By Business Cloud News

Red Hat and NEC announced a partnership that will see the two firms jointly develop carrier-focused network function virtualization (NFV) features based on Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution, reports Business Cloud News.

The partnership will among other things see NEC leverage its telco network know-how and integrate its NFV capabilities with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, moving beyond the NFV capabilities built into vanilla OpenStack (Nova).

The firms said the resulting platform will include a virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) as well as a virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE), with plans to harden the platform in a bid to make it – and the integrated NFV features – more carrier-grade.

“NFV offers tremendous potential to transform the telecommunications industry and radically change the way CSPs deliver solutions to their customers. NEC has long appreciated the power of ‘open’, and has always been an excellent partner,” said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president, Infrastructure Business Group, Red Hat “Through this expanded collaboration, Red Hat is excited to help meet CSP interest in NFV and open source cloud platforms – and more specifically, OpenStack, as they look for solutions to drive costs down and deliver new high value offerings.”

Atsuo Kawamura, senior vice president at NEC Corporation said:  “We are working to build an open industry standard which has enormous potential for expanding awareness and adoption of NFV. NEC, as a top 10 OpenStack contributor and a proven network vendor, aims to continue collaborating with Red Hat to drive innovation in the telecom industry through open source.”

The move comes just a couple of months after Red Hat announced a similar partnership with Chinese infrastructure specialist Huawei to deliver carrier grade, OpenStack-based cloud solutions to enable NFV deployments.