Carrier Network Virtualization Summit

There has been significant activity in the networking area around technologies such as NFV, SDN and OpenFlow. We got a chance to witness the momentum behind NFV at the Carrier Network Virtualization Summit from December 9th thru 11th in Palo Alto. This event had over 300 attendees and featured a few really great opportunities for both the vendors and the attendees.

We really liked the “Speed Networking” session. In this session, the vendor representatives get a chance to meet with a potential client and have a five minute face to face meeting until the so called “cow bell” rings and then switched to next “date”. This session maximized our opportunities to connect with the operators attending the event.

Carriers are partnering with standard bodies such as ETSI and vendors to push for NFV. Various vendors are promising to simplify the network complexity by offering VNFs. The main driver of all these activities is the need to create agile network services that can be designed and deployed quickly based on application and user requirements.

Creating an end to end network service requires expertise in configuring devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, load-balancers, WAN Optimizers etc, from multiple vendors. Manual creation of such services leads to longer service delivery, configuration errors and security violations. Delivering agile network services will need orchestration platforms which can work with physical and virtual appliances using overlays, underlays and OpenFlow protocols.

At Anuta Networks, we set out to develop such an orchestration platform to enable agile network services.

Anuta’s NCX network service orchestrator integrates with many cloud portals such as OpenStack thereby introducing self-service for network operations. Using an intuitive graphical service designer, network administrators can define various levels of network services combining L2-L7 network functions.

The network services are orchestrated on-demand and delivered within minutes using industry best practices. The solution works with legacy physical and upcoming virtual appliance- based solutions in a multi-tenant environment.

With so many meetings and sessions throughout the day, this event was extremely informative. I am excited about the momentum and I look forward to significant NFV deployments in 2015.

– Kate Garrison, Jan 21st, 2015.