ECI new platform seeks to bring service agility closer to the edge
ECI, a global provider of the “elastic network” technologies , announced its Hybrid Virtualization Platform Thursday, created to support an array of network functions virtualization (NFV) use cases.
NFV architecture serves as the backbone of network solutions. With IT technologies, network node functions can be virtualized into an interconnected chain of communication services. The Hybrid Virtualization Platform combines hardware with management and orchestration (MANO), providing a platform as a service (PaaS) to organize different virtual network functions (VNFs). It is available on a “pay-as-you-grow” subscription model, and intended to reduce operation expenses (OPEX), shorten time to market, and mix and match multiple functions on a single platform.
“It’s (NFV) one of those things that is sort of a must have, especially if you do the kind of things we do, which is edge routing, edge switching and other things that go out to the edge,” said Scott Wilkinson, senior marketing portfolio director at ECI. “More and more of that functionality is going to be virtualized. People are going to want security and all the other features out there in a virtual way. This allows us to enter that market as well.”
One of the selling points of NFV has been the ability to spin up virtual machines on a platform to perform network functions with ease. However, service providers soon discovered platforms and VNFs don’t always work together. Getting VNFs to operate on top of certain platforms can require significant tweaking. ECI’s Hybrid Virtualization Platform was developed to address this hurdle.
“That’s one of the reasons we are doing this service platform,” said Scott Wilkinson. “It is based on the latest in cloud enabled services; it is microservice based; it makes it a lot easier to do things like DevOps; you can build things overtime; you can work with software; it has the container-type architecture built into it. We believe starting from that kind of base is going to give us an advantage, especially in terms of ultimately making things work together better.”
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ECI’s Hybrid Virtualization Platform leverages multi-access edge computing (MEC) capabilities to alleviate the workload of core networks. It encompasses the Mercury NFVi platform, ETSI-compliant MANO and a library of VNFs. By bringing service agility closer to the network edge, ECI says the platform can accommodate future demands of IoT networks and 5G.
“Virtualization at the edge can help unlock all the potential hidden in their current infrastructure, and create additional value on top of current assets,” said Erez Zelikovitz, VP SDN/NFV Solutions Global Portfolio at ECI, in a press release. “We are giving our customers a cost-effective, future proof and easy-to-implement solution, which they can use now to improve service agility, and for the demands of future IoT and 5G networks on the same open and flexible platform.”
The platform is founded on open industry standard architecture, which serves as a guideline for making modifications to the software. Several organizations have embraced open source projects as a way to make improvements and updates to a program based upon feedback from the community. Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) and the Linux Foundation, for instance, are collaborating on an open source project called IoTivity to sketch a framework for connecting billions of IoT devices.
“It’s all based on open source; it’s based on open interfaces and we do have a commitment to that,” said Wilkinson. “I don’t want it to sound like we are doing anything proprietary here. Obviously the way we are putting it together we think is superior. The intention is to build something open so it can work with leeway.”