ETSI, ONF partner on Network Functions Virtualization development

The development of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is getting the concentrated attention of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF).

The two organizations have entered into a strategic partnership agreement to pool their respective expertise in open Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as a guide to enabling forward-plane support for NFV use cases, including how to build dynamic, programmable Virtualized Network Function (VNF) forwarding graphs, the two companies said in a press release.

"ETSI is focused on addressing the problems that telecommunications networks face today by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types into industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage. This collaboration with ONF allows us to both significantly contribute to the goals of the NFV ISG (Industry Specifications Group), and serve as a relevant source for requirements and use cases for the SDN community," said ETSI Director-General Luis Jorge Saro.

As part of the collaboration, ONF released the OpenFlow-enabled SDN and NFV solution brief to show how operators can combine NFV and SDN to meet common goals and overcome network challenges.

"The goal of the ONF relationship with the ETSI NFV ISG (is) to further the adoption of NFV by network operators (and) serve as a critical source of requirements and solutions for the open networking community," said Dan Pitt, ONF's executive director.

For more:
- ETSI and ONF issued this press release

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