Nokia reboots CloudBand Infrastructure Software with better OpenStack management

Nokia announced today that it has added a range of updates and tweaks to its CloudBand Infrastructure Software (CBIS) platform.

Specifically, the updated CBIS makes it easier and faster for service providers to manage and deploy new versions of OpenStack by working directly with the open source community. 

"Operators risk unwanted complexity and costs in their OpenStack infrastructure by creating new virtualized silos, and they stand to benefit from a unified approach," said Peter Fetterolf, CTO of ACG Business Analytics, in a prepared statement. "By streamlining process definition, execution, and maintenance across multiple vendors for activities like onboarding Virtual Network Functions, deploying and updating software, and troubleshooting using disparate tool chains, operators can reduce the cost of managing and maintaining cloud infrastructure by 92% over a five-year period and total cost of ownership by 56% over the same period."

CloudBand Infrastructure Software allows service providers to unify their network function virtualization infrastructure (NFVi) and virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM) in order to support centralized and distributed edge cloud deployments and workloads.

While enterprises and telcos have used OpenStack for years now, it's not always easy to install, or to make transitions from one version to the next.

"It is kind of well known, well documented, the challenges that customers have in sort of upgrading from OpenStack release to OpenStack release." said Nokia's Dan McBride, software marketing director, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "So we're dramatically smoothing out how an operator is able to move from one release to the next, beginning with our current CloudBand Infrastructure Software release."

"We have preintegrated a range of things into this release. One is a SDN Controller, and the preintegration is geared towards saving opex for integrating that stuff. We have preintegrated CBIS with the Nokia SDN controller in the package," he added.

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McBride said Nokia has added some open-source troubleshooting environments into CBIS as well. OpenStack's Vitrage is for root cause analysis to understand what's happening in the infrastructure while Zabbix is an open source monitoring software tool that's also bundled into CBIS.

Then we've built a CBIS manager, which is a graphical user interface to the myriad command lines and scripted methods for controlling, configuring, setting up, and managing the environment," McBride said. "So in general it's just a window into the platform that is easy to use, and it is also looks at and controls all the cloud deployments that you have in your domain. It can replicate changes from one to the other, to again help smooth out operations."

Nokia's Ronen Rotem, CloudBand program manager, said Nokia has also added in region- and country-specific security procedures into the CBIS manager. Those procedures can be automated to comply with regional security requirements by, for example, ANSSI in France. CBIS also supports the U.S. NSA requirements and regulations and it is the first in the market to support security requirements for STIG 7 CAT I and II, which are the U.S. military requirements.

With service providers moving away from silos and towards containers and Kubernetes, the CBIS manager can also manage clusters that include both virtual machine cloud-based environments and container-based cloud environments, according to McBride.

McBride said CBIS' competitors are comprised of the usual networking suspects.

"Certainly Huawei is going to be a competitor where they're able to deploy in the infrastructure like this," he said. "No question about it, but we'll see. We see the typical guys in the operators' spaces. We'll see Huawei, we'll see Ericsson, we'll see Cisco. The smaller guys, Red Hat in particular, that are evolved with the OpenStack commercial distributions, we'll see them as well but not so much in the operator space, which is what we primarily serve."

McBride said the previous version of CBIS has been deployed 67 times across thousands of servers.