NFV, Cloud and SDN Moving Beyond Simple Virtualization

Introduction The evolutionary change of telecommunications networks towards all-IP mechanisms has begun to collapse the traditional boundaries between IT infrastructure and telecommunications infrastructure. The IT datacenter has for years been the location for web-based services and applications. As the telecommunications environment has moved to all-IP, more and more of the functions of the network can be available as pure software functions, deployable leveragint these previously IT centric datacenter architectures. This is certainly evidenced by the emergence of pure-IP communications networks based on IMS and SIP, transported over IP Cable, Fiber, LTE and the like. Increasing the operator's interest in this evolution are the compelling operational savings and capital expenditure efficiencies, as well as the service agility to be gained from moving historically proprietary hardware solutions to a more generic compute environment. Hence the motivation by operators to adopt all-IP networks and the introduction of cloud and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) general purpose compute datacenter architectures, including Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) specific architectures. This paper examines the key tenets of NFV and SDN that are important for Service Providers considering implementation of these technologies, moving beyond simple virtualization of network functions to commodity hardware and embracing Elasticity, Orchestration, Scalability and Distributed Architectures for signaling and media from this foundation with the larger goals listed above as the end target.