Huawei, Red Hat partner on cloud solutions for NFV

Chinese infrastructure specialist Huawei and open source software vendor Red Hat have announced a partnership to deliver carrier grade, OpenStack-based cloud solutions to enable NFV deployments.

The two partners plan to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform with Huawei’s FusionSphere Cloud OS at the management layer to offer what they said will be a unified, open, flexible and production-ready cloud solution to support NFV implementations.

“Carriers and telecommunications service providers are under pressure to modernize their network infrastructure to meet demands created by new service offerings and the explosive volume of data crossing the network,” Tim Yeaton, SVP Infrastructure Business at Red Hat said.

“As a result, many are exploring the benefits OpenStack-based clouds can bring to NFV projects. By combining Huawei’s leadership in the telecommunications industry with Red Hat’s leadership in OpenStack and, more broadly, enterprise open source, we are well positioned to deliver cloud solutions that enable carriers to meet their network modernization challenges.”

According to Huawei and Red Hat, the partnership will contribute NFV-enabling features required for cloud deployments by CSPs to the upstream OpenStack community. They said this contribution will also benefit the wider OpenStack community- unlike approaches which favour proprietary add-ons and further vendor lock-in, as Huawei put it.

“Huawei offers its customers a true carrier-grade OpenStack solution, and we are honoured to expand our existing partnership with Red Hat to include collaboration on OpenStack for network functions virtualization,” Ren Zhipeng, Huawei Cloud Computing Product Line President said.

“Through open collaboration with partners like Red Hat, Huawei aims to support the business reform and transformation of the telecom industry. This partnership will focus on NFV and the development of joint solutions to foster an open, interconnected, and innovative ecosystem that supports the entire OpenStack community.”