Platform is designed to accelerate NFV adoption

Using Broadcom's new Open NFV platform, OEMs and ecosystem vendors can easily migrate virtual functions (VF) between platforms based on various vendor solutions. A proof of concept (PoC) demonstrating a live VF state migration between multiple ISAs has been approved by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG).

"As more organizations move toward an NFV model, they will need an easy way to migrate virtual functions across platforms," said Werner Schaefer, Hewlett Packard Vice President, Network Functions Virtualization. "Industry collaboration via open standards, like those supported by Broadcom and HP, enable customers to move NFV forward from concept into reality through tight interoperability between all of the components needed to rollout an Open NFV platform."

"Customers have been asking for an ISA-independent solution to migrate virtual functions across diverse platforms, something they didn't previously have," said Ron Jankov, Broadcom Senior Vice president and General Manager, Processors and Wireless Infrastructure. "Broadcom's partnership with ARM and other third party vendors helps advance our NFV goals and meet the workload flexibility and scalability needs of our customers, while maintaining our commitment to a truly open ecosystem."

In partnership with ARM, Broadcom is working to enable equipment manufacturers designing NFV solutions to meet next-generation carrier-class requirements utilizing open standards that enhance code portability and reduce development time. "Broadcom and ARM have been working together within ETSI and Linaro to standardize programming models, tools, APIs and network-specific libraries to create a truly open software environment," said Charlene Marini, ARM Vice President of Marketing, Embedded Segment. "NFV platforms such as Broadcom's are a key building block in enabling network operators to deploy flexible high-performance, energy-efficient network architectures based on a consistent software platform."

As telecom providers and network operators move to a carrier cloud architecture, they are looking for cost effective solutions to virtualize workloads on industry standard servers. Broadcom's Open NFV platform provides scalability, workload flexibility and interoperability for the successful implementation of NFV. The basis of Broadcom's Open NFV platform is open source components such as Linux, KVM and OVS giving customers a consistent platform independent of the target SoC's ISA, thus allowing vendors to develop NFV applications that are highly portable. "We are very pleased to see the industry driving NFV implementation according to the ETSI NFV ISG PoC Framework," said Don Clarke, British Telecom Head of Network Evolution Innovation.  "Portability and flexibility will make a significant contribution to the successful rollout of new solutions based on NFV." 

Broadcom's platform supports open Application Programming Interface (API) standards such as Linaro's Open Data Plane (ODP) to access acceleration components for scaling critical functionality and reducing time-to-market delays. By supporting open API standards it ensures that customers can take advantage of the market leading capabilities that Broadcom has put into three generations of multi-core processor SoCs while still maintaining the desired platform portability.  Accelerators, a mainstay in today's infrastructure equipment, are critical for scaling networking, storage and security functions to useful performance levels in NFV platforms. For the successful implementation of NFV, Broadcom provides a fully virtualized high performance multi-core processor SoC with tightly coupled accelerators that will be available in a wide range of server form factors as well as standardized Open Compute Platforms (OCP).

In Broadcom's Virtual Function State Migration and Interoperability PoC, recently accepted by ETSI NFV ISG, Broadcom is demonstrating a Tieto implementation of an Enhanced Packet Core (EPC) and migrating the VF state from operating on one ISA to a different ISA. This portability is imperative to the future success of any NFV implementation. Using standard APIs, Broadcom's software partners take advantage of the XLP data plane accelerators such as Central Messaging Station (CMS) and Network Accelerator Engines (NAE) that are unique to Broadcom, to offer unparalleled application performance, workload flexibility and scalability.

In addition to the platform, Event Machine, the underlying technology for ODP from ENEA along with application ID from QOSMOS and data plane acceleration from 6WIND, will be demonstrated at Broadcom's booth during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 24 - 27.