Industrial Introduction to NFV

Peter WillisBT Research & Innovation

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Industrial Introduction to NFV Contents

• What is Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) ?

• Customer & Operational Benefits

• Industry Adoption

• Open Innovation

• BT’s Activities

• Use Cases:

• Virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE)

• Cloud Connect Value Added Services

• Industry Perspectives

• BT’s NFV Development Status

• Operational Challenges

BRAS

FirewallDPI

CDN

Tester/QoEmonitor

WANAccelerationMessage

Router

Radio NetworkController

CarrierGrade NAT

Session BorderController

Classical Network ApplianceApproach

PE RouterSGSN/GGSN

Fragmented non-commodity hardware.Physical install per appliance per site.Hardware development large barrier to entry for new vendors constraining innovation & competition.

Network functions VirtualisationApproach

IndependentSoftwareVendors

Standard High Volume Switches

Standard High Volume Servers

Standard High Volume Storage

Orchestrated,automatic &remote install.

What is Network Functions Virtualisation?

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• Uniformity of operations

• Reduced training

• Simplified In Service Software Upgrades

• Simplified High Availability

• Simplified planning & provisioning

• Simplified disaster recovery

• Common sparing

• Preferred test & diagnostic tools embedded

• Automation of installation

• Reduced site visits

From To

V 1.0 V 1.1

Operational Benefits

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• Simplification of network gear installed on premises

• Reduced space and energy consumption

• Less truck rolls and site visits (reduces opex)

• Ability to automate introduction of new services with minimal disruption to existing services

• Customer does not need to be present on site for provision of new network function

• Reduced provision time-months to minutes

• Higher availability- reduced box count reduces hardware components that can fail (less power supplies, fans, cables etc)

• Service agility means not just “faster”, but new models:

• Tailored services for customers• Try-before-you-buy

• Customers can respond rapidly to business drivers:

• Bring up new sites quicker to connect to corporate network

• Fast and seamless adaption to on site changes

• Asset recovery- flexible re-use of software assets

Summary of Customer Benefits

27 network service providers surveyed (representing 53% of global telecom capex) will deploy NFV at some point with 81% expecting to do so by 2017. IHS Technology “NFV Strategies” Aug 2016.

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The NFV Revolution

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Infonetics forecast NFV revenue to grow from $928M in 2014 to $8.1B in CY18, with a 2013-2018 CAGR of 76%.

Vendor Adoption

Extent of initiatives

Extent of strategic vision

Live deployments

PoCs / Trials

Pragmatic approach

Long-term approach

• VNF roadmap for the next three years

• Platform-driven approach: UNICA project

• vCPE live trial in Brazil

• Domain 2.0 NFV/SDN program• 21 NFs virtualized in 2015, 86 in

2016• 75% of WAN virtualized by 2020• Developed CORD concept• Network-on-Demand live• Plan to have 50% of open source

software• ECOMP framework up and running

• NFV evolution roadmap activatedin 2015

• Deployment of a Vmware Cloudplatform for NFV & VoLTE

• Live vGGSN at small customers• M2M with Affirmed Networks• MVNO launched on NFVi in Spain• Multi vendor VNF with Amdocs

• Network virtualization plan around NFV and SDN defined in early 2015

• OpenStack platform deployed in 5 DC in 2016

• NFV strategic plan defined, including techno trials and training program

• NetroSphere concept & program

• Launching Live vEPC in early 2016

• Currently virtualizing its IMS platform and launching vSBC

• Going to launch VoLTE services

• Successfully conducted residential vCPE PoC in early 2015

• TeraStream all IP network model• SDN-based VPN trial in 2015, Europe-

wide live deployment by 2018• Experimented running VNFs in Linux

containers

• EasyGo Network (VPN) trial in 2015, already live at some clients, larger deployments in 2016

• Investigation on NextGen PoP• RFP on orchestration

• NovoNet 2020 NG network plan (including NFV/SDN)

• vIMS small scale pilot in 2015• Field trial of VRAN in 2015• Preparing NFV-based VoLTE

• Launched VoLTE services with vIMS in Kuwait in 2015

• Anticipation project launched by Orange Labs

• On Demand Network program

• PoCs focused on orchestration, performance, vIMS

• Launched vCPE in 2012• 2/3 of total CPE installed base under

vCPE solution (enterprise customers)

• Launched NFV-based IoT platform with vEPC

• Launching PoC for full ISO 7-layer stack fulfilment, activation and orchestration of VNFs in carrier networks

• Evolving Cloud VPN service by deploying orchestrator to provision and service chain physical and virtual network functions.

Copyright © 2016 Capgemini Consulting. All rights reserved.Source: Capgemini analysis

Network Operators Adoption

The NFV Open Innovation Story

Authored & EditedBy BT

Convened By BTResearch initiated & led by BT

• ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group now has 300 members, ~30 tier 1 carriers.

• The Jul 2014 plenary had 303 participants.• 41 multi-vendor NFV Proof of Concepts.

Informal discussions on cooperation began in April 2012

At an operator meeting in June 2012 we coined the new term

“Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV)”.

We decided to convene a new industry forum, and publish a

joint white paper to galvanise the industry

In September 2012 we decided to parent the new forum under

ETSI called the “NFV ISG”

In October 2012 we published the first joint-operator NFV white

paper as a “call to action”.

• This paper is widely regarded as the seminal paper heralding

this new approach for networks.

The first NFV ISG plenary session was held in January 2013

In Oct 2013 the 1st NFV ISG documents were released after

only 10 months, and a second joint-carrier NFV white paper

published to provide our perspectives on progress.

Plans to publish 96 specifications of which ~50 are finalised.

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BT Global

Network

- Hardware ordering, pre-staging, ship- Site visit, physical rack & stack

- Once server deployed, no further site visits, physical racking/stacking, etc

- Service outage during commission ~secs/mins- End-to-end service provision time ~minutes/days

2am 4am

Planned Work start

Planned Work end

Current Model(Appliance per

Service)

NFV Model(Single Box hosts

n*Services)

Non NFV: 3 * truck rolls

NFV: 1 * truck roll

Customer branchoffice deployment

of network appliances

BT Global

Network

Customer branchoffice deployment

of virtual appliances

vmware (hypervisor)

OpsManagement

OpsManagement

BT Use Case 1: Virtual Enterprise CPEOr “Universal CPE”

The Paradox of a “standard high volume server”

Cost of a NFV solution

• Value of NFV is in the openness of the eco-system.

• Standard high volume i.e. portable, software is more important than the

form factor of the server:

• Different form factors may be more appropriate for different

locations.

• Virtual Network Functions (Virtual Appliances) should start from

leveraging the existing IT software eco-system e.g: x86/ARM,

Linux/Windows, KVM/Vmware.

“SmartNID” or “Rouser” v Rack Mount Server forVirtual Enterprise CPE at the Customer Premise

SmartNID or Rouser

• 1 Box solution.

• Server right sized to WAN interface.

• Embedded & secure management channel to “Lights Out Manager”.

• Dying gasp.

• Network Timing (SyncE)

Rack Mount Server

• 2 or 3 box solution.

• May be overkill for low bandwidth sites.

• Extra cabling for lights out manager

• Commodity hardware.

• No SyncE.

Today, our customers and many of their key applications are accessed via the public Internet. The boundaries are blurring and we must extend the security, reliability and trust of our private networks out into public networks.

We need a new hybrid approach.

Traditionally, private networks used to connect customer sites together and to host their applications.Connectivity to “non critical” services hosted on public Internet via a few, heavily fortified gateways.

We kept the rest of the world out.

BT IP Connect GlobalCloud Service Nodes: securely

integrating hybrid, private, cloud & Internet- “Cloud of Clouds”.

GPop

BT IP Connect Global

Customer or Service

VPN

Provider Edge

Virtual Accelerator

Virtual Firewall

Virtual Analytics

NFVNow using NFV to offer range of

Value Add Service (VAS) capabilities, but hosted

within BT’s cloud(Cloud Connect Security &

Acceleration)

Internet

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BT Use Case 2: Cloud Connect Value Added Services

Virtual Enterprise CPE on NFV Infrastructure on the customer premise for BT GS in development. Live field trials completed.

Virtual Enterprise CPE in the “Cloud” research project.

BT Dynamic Network Services development programme underway. BT DIY Orchestrator in development.

BT already using NFV for: Cloud Connect Value Added Services, vSBC for BT OnePhone, internal firewalls & load balancers.

R&I NFV Proof of Concepts completed: vBNG, vEPC, vIPsec, vE-CPE on uCPE, NFV Orchestration, vCDN, vVideo QoE, lab tester, Openstack, Low latency KVM, Intel Cache Allocation Tech, vE-CPE in the cloud, Rousers.

Research Underway – Containers & Unikernels for NFV, advanced Orchestration using Machine Learning and DevOps.

NFV Projects in BT Overview

http://www.globalservices.bt.com/uk/en/whybt/dynamic-network-services

LOVE & HATE NFV Operational ChallengesLow Overhead Virtualisation Environment and High Availability Trusted Environments

• Maintaining service chains

• Securing NFVI & VNFs

• Software Licencing

• Virtual Infrastructure Management Scaling

• Lowing Virtualisation Overhead

• High Availability without 1+1

• Training

• Guaranteeing Performance & Time to Repair SLAs

• Zero-touch secure boot-up

Low Overhead Virtualization Environments & High Availability Trusted Environments for NFV – 1 to 3

1. Service Function Chaining

a) Identifying which service chain flows belong to in multi-tenant VNFs.

b) Non-service interrupting service chain modification.

c) Service-chain OAM i.e. detecting & locating service chain faults.

2. Security

a) Attestation of hardware, BIOS, NFVI and VNFs.

b) Securing NFVI & VNFs when located in highly distributed physically insecure locations.

c) Securing the production, shipping & installation of NFVI.

d) Protecting NFVI managed over the Internet.

3. Software Licencing

a) Standardising the methods & APIs for licencing NFVI software and VNFs.

b) Separating s/w licence implementation from commercial licencing models.

c) Ensuring software licencing model does not create a common mode failure mechanism.

d) Zero-touch licencing of VNFs.

e) Licencing VNFs on NFVI that is air-gapped from all other networks.

vmware (hypervisor)

Low Overhead Virtualization Environments & High Availability Trusted Environments for NFV – 4 to 7

4. Virtual Infrastructure Management Scalability

• Today’s VIMs (OpenStack, CloudStack, Vcenter) are not suited for a highly distributed high scale (millions(SMEs/SMBs) to billions (IoT)) of nodes solution.

5. Low Virtualisation Overhead

• Classical VMs use too much memory, waste CPU cycles and take too long to boot making some NFV use cases not cost effective. A Low Overhead Virtualisation Environment (LOVE) is required e.g. Containers & Unikernels.

6. High Availability.

• Networks must have >5 9s availability (some use cases >6 9s). This could be achieved by classical network protection mechanisms (e.g. 1+1, load balancing) but LOVE offers mechanisms to boot new VNFs in milliseconds lending itself to new very high availability mechanisms with low redundancy.

7. Training

• Most network operators have issues finding people with the right virtualisation (NFV & SDN) skills to design & operate NFV solutions. Open sourced high quality training courses focused on network operators’ requirements are required.

99.999%

Low Overhead Virtualization Environments & High Availability Trusted Environments for NFV – 8 to 98. Guaranteeing Performance & Time to Repair SLAs

• How do network operators integrate multi-vendor solutions together and guarantee performance? When these multi-vendor solutions break due to bugs how is finger pointing avoided and vendors encouraged to work together to fix the problem in a timely fashion. How can this integration & testing be done in a cost effective manner shared across the Industry?

9. Zero-touch secure boot-up.

a) Today’s PXE methods are designed to work on secure LANs. This needs to be improved to work across WANs and at insecure sites. Pre-staging is not cost effective. Installation needs to be deskilled and automated. The solution needs to be open.

b) If the router is virtualised how can the device (NFVI) connect to the network (when BGP, PPPoE, DHCP, etc. needs to be instantiated first)?

c) How can the NFVI be managed with only a single /32 or /30 IP address?

d) How can the virtual router and/or the NFVI software be upgraded without risking loss of network connectivity? (i.e. fail

Challenges for the Industry with Containers for NFV

Containers for NFV could give Carriers and Vendors radical efficiency gains for compute, development & operational resources plus improved flexibility and responsiveness compared to VMs but several challenges have to be addressed:

1. Container management systems (CMS) need to natively support multiple network interfaces per container.

2. VNFs need to be decomposed into micro-services to make best use of resources.

3. Carriers need to develop “NetDevOps” models to make best use of micro-services.

4. Security - making it difficult to escape and difficult to damage once escaped

5. The business benefits of Containers for NFV needs to be quantified to drive this innovation.

These are small cows not far away.

NFV Summary

• Network Operators will adopt NFV & SDN to meet customers demands for more dynamic and efficient services that allow them to be more flexible.

• Network technology & operations will have to change to make best use of NFV & SDN.

• NFV deployment is in the early days, just starting to go into service, and significant challenges need to be addressed to maximise scale and automation.

• There are many research opportunities.

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Find out more:http://www.globalservices.bt.com/uk/en/products/network-like-never-beforehttp://www.globalservices.bt.com/uk/en/point-of-viewhttp://www.globalservices.bt.com/uk/en/products/cloud-connectivityhttp://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/bt/pressreleases/bt-accelerates-cloud-of-clouds-with-new-hosted-riverbed-service-1269791

More Information

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BT Orchestration Architecture

OSS ApplicationAccess Layer

BSS MyAccount Portal

Quote & Order Billing Ticketing

Service Design & Orchestration

Federated UI

TOSCA Orchestrator

Assurance

Catalogue Editor Application Access

Workflow

Network & Service Activation

Min. Diff.

EngineAnalytics

InventoryRemediation

RCA

ReusablePlug-ins

Catalogue

SDN Controllers

VIMs

PNFs VNFs

NFV-enabled Cloud Service Node

NFV-enabled Cloud Service

Node

BT’s Cloud Collaboration services

NFV-enabled Cloud Service Node

NFV-enabled Cloud Service

Node

Performance-based routing

NFV Optimsation

NFV Firewall

NFV

NFV

NFV Firewall

BT’s Cloud of Clouds Vision

BT Connect portfolio delivers secure, high performance connectivity to cloud services.

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Our Cloud of Cloud vision is enabled by NFV and SDN.

Many POC customer trials andnow live deployments

Our Next Gen Cloud Contact services use virtualised – centralised components.

NFV is used vSBC for BT OnePhone,- internal firewalls & load balancers.

Cloud Compute uses SDN and NFV to offer the virtualised service to customers

NFV enabled Checkpoint Firewalls in our 13 Internet Gateways to SAAS providers

BT has led the research and industry. Initial research into NFV initiated and led by BT.

June 2012 term “NFV” agreed at operator meeting. First white paper on NFV written and published by BT.Jan 2013 First ETSI NFV ISG meeting convened by BT.

Our BT Cloud Connect service uses NFV for Riverbed acceleration and Checkpoint firewalls

CMS uses SDN and NFV to offerthe virtualised service to customers

BT Private Compute orchestrate allows customers to take advantage of the same services available through Cloud Compute

using SDN and NFV

BT are collaborating with vendors to test how NFV / SDN technologies can be used in

different use cases – ADVA, Huawei, HP, Cisco

Global launch of Connect IntelligenceIWAN solution

Cloud Connect platform

IP Connect Global

BT Internet Connect Global

Gateway

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Acc

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Value added services

Cloud Connect platform.• Rapid implementation.• Common orchestration of multiple services.• Global reach and strong existing presence in key cloud locations.• Leveraging economies of scales of the BT IP Connect Platform.

Cloud Connect Security.• Virtualised security built into Cloud Connect Points of Presence.• Check Point Software integrated within Points of Presence.• Security option for IPsec VPN.

Cloud Connect Acceleration.• Virtualised acceleration built into the Cloud Connect Points of Presence.• Riverbed Technology Inc’s Steelhead technology.• Improved end user experience and bandwidth reduction.

Internet Gateway.• IP Connect (MPLS) to Internet Connect Gateways.• Global coverage at major Internet peering points.• Breakout from customer VPN and enables custom routing for traffic.

optimisation path to Cloud service providers.

Cloud Connect Direct.• Direct Connection to major Software as a Service Providers.• Direct on net BT Cloud Compute, BT Contact and BT One cloud services. • Direct Connecting with virtual connections.

Cloud Connect data centre.• On net-fibre to over 200 data centres worldwide.• Direct Connect with virtual connects to data centres globally.

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BT Cloud Connect Programme

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