Nokia, Intel collaborate on open source hardware

Just a week after Nokia (NYSE:NOK) announced an agreement to help China Mobile move to a more flexible cloud network infrastructure, Nokia said it is teaming up with Intel to make its carrier-grade AirFrame Data Center Solution hardware available for an Open Platform Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) Lab.

The move means the hardware can be used by the OPNFV collaborative open source community to accelerate the delivery of cloud-enabled networks and applications.

Nokia said the OPNFV Lab, which also was announced at the OPNFV Summit in Berlin, will be a testbed for NFV developers and accelerates the introduction of commercial open source NFV products and services. Developers will be able to test carrier-grade NFV applications for performance and availability. 

Nokia is making its AirFrame Data Center Solution available as a public OPNFV Lab with the support of Intel, which is providing Intel Xeon processors and Intel solid state drives to give communications service providers the advantage of testing OPNFV projects on the latest and greatest server and storage technologies.

Introduced just over a year ago, the Nokia AirFrame Data Center Solution is 5G-ready and Nokia said it was the first to combine the benefits of cloud computing technologies to meet the stringent requirements of the telco world. It's capable of delivering ultra-low latency and supporting the kinds of massive data processing requirements that will be required in 5G.

"We welcome Nokia joining the OPNFV Pharos federation of distributed Labs," said Morgan Richomme, NFV network architect for Innovative Services at Orange Labs, OPNFV Functest PTL, in a release. "NFV interoperability testing is very challenging, so the more labs we have, the better it will be collectively for the industry."

Earlier this month, AT&T (NYSE: T) officially added Nokia to its list of 5G lab partners working to define 5G features and capabilities. It's also working with Intel and Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC).

AT&T, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and to some extent T-Mobile US have talked about shifting toward an SDN/NFV infrastructure at the same time they're moving to 5G, but Sprint (NYSE: S) hasn't been as aggressive about linking the two. Sprint CTO John Saw, however, told FierceWirelessTech that it is running a lot of tests and proofs of concepts in the labs relative to SDN and NFV.

For more:
- see the press release

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