Huawei launches multi-vendor NFV lab in China

Huawei has launched an open lab in Xi’an, China, which the telecom kit giant said is dedicated to multi-vendor efforts to further the development of NFV infrastructure, platforms and services.

According to Huawei, NFV adoption requires operators to overcome several challenges, including multi-vendor product consistency, reliability and interoperability. Other challenges identified by the firm included integration complexity, optimising the NFV O&M experience, and identifying new revenue opportunities.

Apparently with all this in mind, Huawei said it plans to continue building its multi-vendor integration verification platform, which it claimed is based on typical service scenarios. The company also said it will eventually create an NFV big data analysis platform, built upon ongoing tests and projects.

“The NFV open lab is an open innovation center of ICT convergence dedicated to being open and collaborative, expanding joint service innovations with partners, and developing the open eco-system of NFV to aggregate values and help customers achieve business success,” Howard Liang, SVP and President of Global Technical Services at Huawei said.

The network specialist said it currently works with over 20 global operators to advance NFV development, as well as partnering with other vendors and members of the open source segment. Some of its current NFV partners include China Mobile, VMware, Red Hat, ETSI (the European standardisation body), OpenStack, OpenDaylight and OPNFV.

The launch of Huawei’s NFV lab follows recent news of ETSI concluding the first phase of NFV standardisation conducted by the Network Functions Virtualisation Industry Specification Group (NFV ISG). The ISG certainly seems to share Huawei’s sentiment of just important collaboration is in the next phase of NFV, with the organisation’s Chair Steven Wright saying: “achieving and validating interoperability at critical reference points is the key focus for phase two.”