Telecom network operator Verizon announced that it has concluded the industry’s largest known Network Function Virtualization (NFV) OpenStack cloud deployment across five of its U.S. data centers.
The NFV project has given birth to a production design upon a core and pod architecture that provides the hyperscale capabilities and flexibility essential to meet the company’s complex network requirements.
Verizon collaborated with Big Switch Networks, Dell and Red Hat to build the OpenStack pod-based design that undertook the journey, which began in 2015, from concept to deployment of 50 racks or more in five production data centers under a time frame of nine months.
Deployments are taking place at present in additional domestic data center and aggregation sites, with international locations on the to-be-deployed list, over the next several months. The design will be inculcated in edge network sites by the end of 2016.
The project built on OpenStack has Red Hat Ceph Storage and a spine-leaf fabric allotted for each pod, which is controlled through a Neutron plugin to Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The multi-vendor deployment utilizes Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric for SDN controller software managing Dell switches, which are run by Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
The US-based telecom giant explained that the deployment process has led to a “production design based on a core and pod architecture that provides the hyperscale capabilities and flexibility necessary to meet the company’s complex network requirements.”
“We consider this achievement to be foundational for building the Verizon cloud that serves our customers’ needs anywhere, anytime, any app,” conveyed Adam Koeppe, VP, Network Technology and Planning, Verizon.
The partners were said to have constructed and tested large scale test beds standing facing the production design to ensure resiliency at a larger scale, and took the open source community to deliver the NFV pod architecture to a high community quality, hence validating the NFV pod architecture.
Vina Krishnan
editor@telecomlead.com