The art of virtualised network function placement

Telefónica, along with vendors Cyan and Red Hat, are working on a network functions virtualisation (NFV) project. The project involves the careful placement of virtualised network functions in the network to improve their performance.

Cyan is delivering its Blue Planet NFV orchestrator software that will make use of enhancements being made to OpenStack developed by Red Hat in close collaboration with Telefónica.

Gazettabyte asked Nirav Modi, director of software innovations at Cyan, about the work.
 

Q: The concept of deterministic placement of virtualised network functions. Why is this important? 

NM: We are attempting to solve a fundamental technology challenge required to make NFV successful for carriers. Telefónica has been doing a lot of internal trials and its own NFV R&D and has found that the placement of virtualised network functions greatly affects their performance. 

We are working with Telefónica and Red Hat to solve this problem, to ensures virtualised network functions perform consistently and at their peak from one instance to another. This is particularly important for composite or clustered virtualised network function architectures, where the placement of various components can affect performance and availability. 

Also, you need to ensure that the virtualised network functions are located where the most suitable compute, storage or networking resources are located. Other important performance metrics that need to be considered include latency and bandwidth availability into the cloud environment.


 

What is involved in enabling deterministic virtualised network functions, and what is the impact on Cyan's orchestration platform?

Deterministic placement requires an orchestration platform, such as Cyan’s Blue Planet, to be aware of the resources available at various NFV points of presence (PoPs) and to map operator-provided placement policies, such as performance and high-availability requirements, into placement decisions. In other words, which servers should be used and which PoP should host the virtualised network function. 

For the operator, interested in application service-level agreements (SLAs) and performance, Cyan’s orchestration platform provides the intelligence to translate those policies into a placement architecture.

Does this Telefonica work also require Cyan's Z-Series packet-optical transport system (P-OTS)? 

NFV is all about taking network functions currently deployed on purpose-built, vertically-integrated hardware platforms, and deploying them on industry-standard commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers, possibly in a virtualised environment running OpenStack, for example. 

In such an set-up, Cyan’s Blue Planet orchestration platform is responsible for the deployment of the virtualised network functions into the NFV infrastructure or telco cloud. Cyan’s orchestration software is always deployed on COTS servers. There is no dependency on using Cyan’s P-OTS to use the Blue Planet software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV software.

The Z-Series platform can be used in the metro and wide area network to enable a scalable and programmable network. And this can supplement the virtual network functions deployed in the cloud to replace existing hardware-based solutions, but the Z-Series is not involved in this joint-effort with Telefónica and Red Hat.