Verizon wraps NFV OpenStack cloud deployment in 5 U.S. data centers

Verizon (NYSE: VZ) has taken the next step forward in transitioning to NFV by completing an OpenStack cloud deployment across five of its data centers in the United States.

After being launched in 2015, the NFV project created a production design based on a core and pod architecture that Verizon says provides the hyperscale capabilities and flexibility necessary to meet the service provider's network requirements.

To create the NFV OpenStack pod-based design for these sites, Verizon worked with Big Switch Networks, Dell and Red Hat. Through this collaboration, the service provider and its vendor partners were able to reach concept to deployment of more than 50 racks in five production data centers in less than nine months.

According to a FierceWirelessTech report, Verizon started its NFV project on such a massive scale, it found that a lot of incumbent vendors were willing to sell it OpenStack, but they wanted to do it in an integrated fashion. However, disaggregation is what the carrier really wanted in order to encourage innovation from incumbents and disruptors and get the cost reductions it was looking for.

In order to validate the resiliency of the NFV pod design at scale, the collaborators constructed large scale test beds mirroring the production design, leveraging the open source community to deliver what they say is validated NFV pod architecture.

The project is based on OpenStack with Red Hat Ceph Storage and a spine-leaf fabric for each pod controlled through a Neutron plugin to Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The multi-vendor deployment leverages Big Switch's Big Cloud Fabric for SDN controller software managing Dell switches, which are orchestrated by Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

Now that it has completed the deployment in these initial five markets, Verizon is planning on introducing the capabilities in other U.S. data center and aggregation sites with plans to launch similar capabilities in international locations over the next several months. Additionally, Verizon's NFV design will be adopted in edge network sites by the end of the year.

"We consider this achievement to be foundational for building the Verizon cloud that serves our customers' needs anywhere, anytime, any app,"  said Adam Koeppe, VP of network technology planning for Verizon, in a release.

Verizon has continued to step up its activity in the NFV and SDN space.

Earlier this year, the service provider joined ONOS (Open source SDN Network Operating System), an organization for service providers and networks and a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

In 2015, Verizon began its formal movement into SDN and NFV in 2015 when it announced its core group of SDN vendors in April 2015. The service provider has employed the help of five of its key vendor partners: Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Cisco, Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC), Juniper Networks and Nokia (NYSE:NOK).

For more:
- see the release

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