Backing its claim that the telco cloud is ready for commercial use, Nokia (NYSE:NOK) Solutions and Networks is rolling out a standardized telco cloud management software solution.
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NSN Telco Cloud Management includes two main components: the vendor's NetAct Operations Support System (OSS) for managing virtualized and non-virtualized network elements, and the new Cloud Application Manager for managing applications in the telco cloud.
NSN's Cloud Application Manager is cloud-platform agnostic and supports a number of cloud stacks, such as VMware and OpenStack. The software manages applications on the telco cloud and automates much of the work needed to develop, deploy and maintain applications on the cloud.
NSN claims its Telco Cloud Management product is the most comprehensive solution from any telecom vendor to comply with guidelines set by the ETSI Industry Specification Group for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). The vendor added that its Cloud Application Manager complies with the group's virtual network functions (VNF) manager.
NSN has been conducting numerous telco cloud trials and proofs of concept with operators, said Sandro Tavares, NSN's head of mobile core marketing. He noted the Cloud Application Manager played a role in a public demonstration last September of telco cloud technology at the IFA trade fair in Berlin, where virtualized IMS and a virtualized VoLTE server enabled the delivery of live VoLTE calls over Vodafone Germany's mobile network.
By managing applications in the cloud, if an operator finds that it needs more capacity for a particular application it can, through the use of automated elasticity management of cloud resources, assign the right processing capacity as needed, Tavares told FierceWirelessTech
He said NSN built its Cloud Application Manager with future uses in mind, so the same product can continue to manage applications as operators look to do even more with the cloud infrastructure down the road.
"We're basically going to be delivering software for a cloud platform that can be implemented by the operator or that we can bring in as well," Tavares said.
He noted that NSN is also extending its end-to-end services to help operators prepare, implement and run their own telco clouds and migrate existing telco services to cloud-based networks.
In addition, the vendor is building a telco cloud partner program and has already extended its relationship with HP, one of its IT platform providers, to the telco cloud. "Operators can benefit either by deploying a complete NSN-built telco cloud infrastructure or by integrating NSN telco cloud solutions on top of their operator clouds, based on the HP cloud platform," NSN said.
Tavares said operators worldwide are interested in virtualization. "I haven't had a single customer meeting in the last few months where this was not brought to the table," he added.
However, he said the most active regions are Western Europe, particularly Germany; Asia, particularly South Korea; and North America.
North American operators are keeping their telco cloud activities quiet, "but there is a lot of work going on at the bigger operators here in North America, which are studying the cloud and figuring out how to implement the cloud," Tavares said.
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(Source: NSN / YouTube) |
For more:
- see this NSN release
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