VMware Helps Communications Service Providers Create and Monetize High-Performance, Agile, and Open Telco Distributed Clouds

BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 28, 2018 -- MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2018 – This week at Mobile World Congress 2018, VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW), demonstrated how the company can help communications service providers (CSPs) create new revenue streams, open new industry opportunities, drive down costs, and improve overall customer satisfaction by becoming agile service providers. Through comprehensive real-world demonstrations, VMware showed how CSPs can adopt and immediately begin to monetize VMware’s growing telco software and Cloud Services portfolio. These offerings were on display in Hall 3, Stand 3K10.

“CSPs require a transition to a cloud-centric virtualized infrastructure and service delivery model that is agile, automated, open, and secure: a move to the Telco Distributed Cloud. VMware enables CSPs to create high-performance, agile, and open Telco Distributed Clouds leveraging NFV and SDN technologies that deliver consistent infrastructure and operations,” said Gabriele Di Piazza, vice president of solutions, Telco NFV Group, VMware. “VMware provides an optimal infrastructure for all telco applications and services—custom-built, packaged, virtualized, cloud-native and SaaS — and enables CSPs to deliver those applications securely to any endpoint across the Telco Distributed Cloud. This includes private cloud, public cloud, branch, edge micro datacenter, gateway, or end user.”

Real-World Application of Virtualization for CSPs
CSPs are adopting VMware solutions as the basis for their network modernization, 5G enablement, and cloud transformation. At Mobile World Congress, VMware demonstrated support for real-world Telco use cases including:

• Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC)/Edge Cloud: VMware’s implementation of a MEC architecture gives CSPs a shared infrastructure platform to support multiple low-latency fixed and mobile use cases. The MEC architecture enables service creation, automation, and delivery across core and edge data centers.  VMware’s demonstration highlights the VMware vCloud NFV platform in a distributed, multi-data center architecture providing full automation and orchestration of services, such as distributed VoLTE and On-Demand Video, across virtual machine and container-based VNFs along with comprehensive Day 2 Operations providing full operational visibility and analytics. VMware has partnered with Affirmed Networks vEPC and Metaswitch vIMS on this effort.
   
• Hybrid Telco Cloud: In partnership with Vodafone, VMware demonstrated how CSPs can extend core network services and applications to a hybrid telco cloud environment by seamlessly stretching applications (IoT), core network services (EPC), and connectivity from private core data networks to public cloud infrastructure on VMware Cloud on AWS, empowering business continuity and failover protection to minimize service disruption. Vodafone and VMware showcased the creation of on-demand infrastructure capacity for overflow scenarios such as traffic bursting, and automated VNF workload migration between multiple distributed cloud environments in the core data network and a public cloud, with a single pane of glass for analytics and monitoring across the global network topology.
   
• IoT/Smart Cities: VMware, in partnership with Globetouch, Affirmed Networks, and Nightingale Security demonstrated live, real-time smart drone flight services delivering physical premises security, HD video surveillance and emergency rapid response services. For CSPs, supporting remote drone missions highlights the ongoing requirements to deliver network-based services that require ultra-high bandwidth, minimal latency requirements, prioritization of mission critical services, and highest levels of QoS. VMware and its partners demonstrated network slicing for prioritization and guarantee of resources for services, along with real-time visibility and management across multiple distributed networks. Read “The Smartest Eye in the Sky at Mobile World Congress 2018.”
   
• NFVI Operations Management and Service Assurance: Focused on lowering the cost of operations and advanced troubleshooting in Telco Distributed Cloud environments, VMware demonstrated advanced operations for Day 0 activities such as service onboarding, service profile definition, KPI, and dashboard configuration; Day 1 activities such as service health and performance management, capacity planning and reclamation, log aggregation, and anomaly detection; and Day 2 activities such as predictive maintenance, workload migration, close loop remediation, and recommendation. Read “Considering a 5G-Ready Telco Cloud? Don’t let Intelligent Operations be an afterthought.”

Improving NFV Infrastructure Performance
VMware also announced the company will be extending its networking architecture to drive higher throughput and network performance and utilization to deliver superior quality of experience. VMware will be working to add DPDK-based techniques that deliver optimal data plane network performance, dramatically reducing CPU processing requirements while preserving all the existing benefits of VMware’s NFV infrastructure. This is designed to enable seamless deployment and consistent high performance for data plane-intensive applications and use cases. VMware’s high-performance networking architecture will be transparent to VNF providers, and will be able to deliver kernel-based security, deterministic resource allocation, linear scalability, and consistent multi-flow performance. The new networking stack will be able to preserve differentiated features such as predictive workload balancing, fault tolerance, live migration and high availability, operations, and visibility. Native implementation of DPDK principles will be able to provide greater control of network traffic while aligning VMware networking with Intel’s rapid pace of innovation in performance and is one example of the deep collaboration between Intel and VMware in delivery of optimized virtual network solutions. Read “VMware and Intel are collaborating to deliver High-Performance, Open and Tested Network Functions for Operators.”

Partner Commentary

Affirmed Networks is the leader in virtualized mobile networks. “5G is changing the way communications service providers build their networks, which need to be more flexible, more scalable, more intelligent, and less expensive to operate,” said Angela Whiteford, vice president of marketing and product management, Affirmed Networks. “Affirmed is working with strategic technology partners such as VMware to accelerate network transformation to a next-generation virtualized architecture. Our partnership will be on display at Mobile World Congress as we showcase our collaboration in delivering an integrated solution to for Globetouch’s connected car and IoT service offerings.”

VMware and Intel are working to enable cloud-optimized, 5G-ready networks with the high performance and efficiency required to meet the needs of CSPs. “Through ongoing technology innovation and a mutual commitment to open source community collaborations, Intel and VMware are leaders in today’s network transformation,” said Sandra Rivera, senior vice president and general manager, Network Platforms Group, Intel. “Next-generation virtualized networks, built on VMware vCloud NFV, Intel Architecture, and open source technologies, can deliver the performance, versatility, and ease-of-use required by service providers.”

Additional Resources

• Read other news from VMware at Mobile World Congress:
     -  VMware Helps Communications Service Providers Chart Their Course To 5G
     -  VMware Extends Internet of Things Strategy with New Edge Computing Solutions
     -  Affirmed Networks and VMware Deliver Integrated Solution to Drive Globetouch’s Connected Car and IoT Service Offerings
• Learn more about the VMware vCloud NFV Platform
• Read the VMware Telco NFV Blog
• Connect with VMware on Twitter and LinkedIn

About VMware
VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, helps customers realize possibilities by accelerating their digital transformation journeys. With VMware solutions, organizations are improving business agility by modernizing data centers and integrating public clouds, driving innovation with modern apps, creating exceptional experiences by empowering the digital workspace, and safeguarding customer trust by transforming security. With 2016 revenue of $7.09 billion, VMware is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA and has over 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners worldwide.

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