RAD to Demonstrate Distributed NFV at Futurecom 2014

New technologies for virtualizing services over telecom operator networks will be in the spotlight at Futurecom 2014, the sector’s largest trade show and congress in Latin America, which will be held October 13-16 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

“This is because service virtualization restrains the chronic and unsustainable growth in networking infrastructure and protects future economic viability,” states Valter Teixeira, General Manager of RAD Brazil. “It is, therefore, an ideal strategy for addressing what service providers see as one of the biggest challenges they now face.”

RAD is one of the event’s sponsors and the industry pioneer in introducing a customer-edge Distributed-NFV solution to the market.

“Over a very short period of time, it has now become commonplace for telecom service providers – which were originally designed to handle traditional voice and some data – to tackle much more sophisticated demands,” Teixeira explains. “As a result, there has been an equally exponential growth in their physical networks.”

For example, Teixeira mentions that billions of high definition videos are transmitted over smartphones, tablets and PCs on any given day, as well as the extensive dependency on complex big data applications that are used by thousands of companies whose traffic volumes are measured in petabytes.

All this, says Teixeira, “represents an extraordinary window of opportunity for telecom operators, but it may also, over the medium term, asphyxiate them, given that their operational and administrative costs are growing in an uncontrolled manner.”

Service Virtualization to Yield Significant Business Growth
For operators, service virtualization promises to reverse this trend and, in fact, yield significant business growth during the current decade.

According to SNS Research, NFV and SDN will eliminate the need to invest as much as $32 billion in physical networking expenses by 2020. They also predict that the worldwide NFV market will grow from $181 million in 2013 to $2.4 billion in 2018.

First Live Public Demo of D-NFV in Latin America
At Futurecom 2014, therefore, RAD will conduct the first live public demonstration of its customer-edge D-NFV solution in Latin America.

The typical perception of NFV is that virtualized network functions (VNFs) should be implemented in data centers, but, from a service provider’s standpoint, they would best be located where they will be most effective and least expensive.

“Service providers should be free to locate NFV in all possible locations, from the data center to the network node to the customer premises,” Teixeira argues. “In addition, RAD’s centerless approach of locating VNFs placed at the customer edge facilitates the ramp-up of NFV solutions that requires a minimum of upfront investment and risk while providing service agility and profitability from Day 1,” he adds. “RAD’s solution has been designed to be an ideal first phase towards full-scale NFV deployment, which may combine VNFs at the customer edge, the network nodes and at the data center.”

RAD’s D-NFV approach is already being evaluated by a number of Tier 1 operators around the world. It allows operators to transfer applications to the customer edge, which is the most practical way today to implement NVF for enterprise services.

Last June, RAD was joined by three other leading manufacturers – Cyan, Fortinet and Certes – in conducting the first live D-NFV proof of concept (PoC), sponsored by CenturyLink and approved by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV ISG, which was held at the Big Telecom Event held in Chicago. The demo showed how virtualized applications, such as security and firewall, could reside at the operator’s client facility for service agility with best user experience, while reducing the cost of doing so.

RAD will be conducting live D-NFV demos throughout the event. In addition, Ilan Tevet, Head of RAD’s Service Provider Line of Business, will speak on the subject of D-NFV at the Futurecom Congress on October 14 at 10 AM.