ARM, Cavium and Enea have teamed up to work with China Mobile on the operator’s plans for network functions virtualisation.
The Open NFV Testlab will use Enea’s commercial NFV Core platform and Cavium’s ARM-based ThunderX workload data centre server processors.
The operator’s Testlab will host the platform as it looks to validate NFV technologies such as virtual consumer premises equipment, broadband remote access server, evolved packet core and IP multimedia system.
The lab will also dovetail into the Open Network Automation Platform project development and automation. China Mobile is a member of the project, which aims to increase the speed and quality of virtualised services and also includes Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia and Orange as members.
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Noel Hurley, Vice President and General Manager, Networking and Servers, Business Segments Group, ARM, said: “ARM and its ecosystem of partners have been committed to enabling OPNFV to bring efficient and cost-effective compute power for the world’s data networks.
“The network pipeline must be expanded, at scale, to support new computing across all markets, in the most efficient way possible.”
Raj Singh, Vice President & General Manager of the Network & Communication Group at Cavium, said: “Telco applications with various compute, I/O, and real time processing requirements demand highly scalable and optimized processing solutions.
“The use of advanced COTS hardware…allows us to provide highly scalable NFV solutions utilising standard software platforms and ecosystems for meeting these requirements.”
Last week, Nokia announced it was working with China Unicom to test how its Virtualised Services Router could help improve the operator’s broadband speeds.
Other recent virtualisation projects include Russian telco VEON working with ZTE on a large scale NFV rollout.