Open source solutions provider Red Hat is collaborating with NEC to jointly develop network functions virtualization (NFV) features in OpenStack, in order to deliver carrier-grade NFV solutions for Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The joint product is a scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution designed for communication service providers.

As these CSPs look to transform their businesses and infrastructure, NFV enables them to deliver customer-facing services more easily and faster, with increased demand capacity.

“NFV offers tremendous potential to transform the telecoms industry and radically change the way CSPs deliver solutions to their customers,” said Tim Yeaton, SVP of the Infrastructure Business Group at Red Hat. “Through this expanded collaboration, Red Hat [will] help meet CSP interest in NFV and open source cloud platforms, as they look for solutions to drive costs down and deliver new high value offerings.”

NEC and Red Hat have collaborated for over ten years on joint open source software development. Their work has seen the acceleration of NFV features in OpenStack and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) in order to achieve carrier-grade and carrier-scale systems, including data plane acceleration through the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). Several of the NFV features resulting directly from this collaboration were included in the OpenStack Juno release, or are planned for the forthcoming OpenStack Kilo release.

The two companies now aim to deliver a reliable, open, and scalable cloud platform for CSPs. By integrating NEC’s NFV system with Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, the firms hope to deliver mobile packet core virtualisation – also known as the virtualised Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) – as well as virtual CPE.

“NEC has commercially delivered SDN/NFV solutions, including vEPC and vCPE, and will continue driving innovation with broader virtualised network functions that promote greater agility, stability and security of services,” said Atsuo Kawamura, SVP of NEC. “Through our collaboration with Red Hat, we are working to build an open industry standard which has enormous potential for expanding awareness and adoption of NFV.”