A hot topic in a cold climate

MWC, once again, captured multiple developments, ideas, initiatives, inventions and new ways of looking at things and delivered universal focus to help us all calibrate our efforts, or at least sensitise our plans. It was great to catch up with colleagues and share ideas and insights about the hugely significant year that 2018 is shaping up to be for Telcos. We can count on an increasing wave of pressure building up around 5G and its natural and ever-present partner, network transformation.

Just about this time last year I posted a blog pre-MWC17 where I said “As MWC17 approaches…there is every sign that things are about to change. To put it another way, there is overwhelming pressure to make sure they do.” My thoughts were around the advent of the IoT and the requirement for carriers to invest carefully in new technology and networking infrastructure as they set about the task of creating the network of the future.

There is more than just a technology issue involved. The business case for modernising the network is strong; new customer demands will require new business models from Telcos, representing a clear step forward on traditional services and demonstrating true organisational agility in giving customers what they want.

For an organisation to be able to respond rapidly to market pressures, revitalising and innovating its services to deliver outstanding customer experiences, it has to have the technological agility to do so. Technology for its own sake is just a way of diluting your ROI. Technology associated with a clear revitalised business strategy and models is a winning combination.

Unprecedented resilience and reliability

I’m not a lone voice in such views. An article in TechTarget suggested:

“ Network functions virtualisation andsoftware-defined networking will play increasingly large roles in the future of networking, converting what used to be specialised hardware or local virtual machines into software running in the cloud. All management functions, including analytics, will reside in the cloud, providing full-function, extensible, manage-anywhere flexibility and unprecedented resilience and reliability.”

Finding the way forward isn’t always easy in a market where so many pressures continue to pile up, so many technologies present themselves as the optimum solution, and so much remains invested in legacy infrastructures, not to say legacy approaches. VMware’s focus at MWC18 was on engaging with individuals to clarify strategies around NFV adoption. To hold back simply because the methodologies may be new is not the soundest of strategies, while all around the signs (5g/IoT/4th Industrial Revolution primarily) are consistently pointing to the need for change.

Virtualisation is a tried and tested technology that has for so long been delivering new efficiencies in the datacentre and across the enterprise in general. The natural assimilation of abstraction into network infrastructures therefore has many use cases to prove its effectiveness. Network operators need only look beyond their own sphere to appreciate what NFV can bring to their networks.

Be different now or be just the same later

Innovation is just that – doing new things, taking on board new approaches and ultimately, daring to be different. Those who do it first are different and they gain the first mover advantage. Those who delay, by definition, become followers. When they do there will be a risk of finding that the best claims have already been staked. At MWC18, VMware showcased how our multi-cloud-to-edge infrastructure and support for OpenStack and cloud-native apps empower CSPs to digitally transform from being no more than ‘connectivity providers’ into agile enablers of rich 5G & IOT services, dynamic content and personalised experiences. We also presented a path for CSP’s to participate in the new “cloud economy” across private, public and Telco clouds to further enable new revenue opportunities.

The hunt for mass market NFV

One of the overall discussion themes at MWC was ‘The Hunt for Mass-Market NFV’, a session described thus: “NFV has been much discussed, and much trialled. There have been few substantial live deployments, though. This session investigates what lessons have been learnt from live NFV so far and what barriers to wider adoption remain in the technology, the market and the mobile industry itself.”

I was a little surprised to see this topic outlined in the way it was, given that VMware now has more than 100 live NFV deployments in production, some running multiple VNFs and multiple services across our NFV infrastructure platform. There are numerous Telcos well ahead of the curve, or where MWC18 believes the curve to be.

NFV is a large constituent element in any strategy to meet the future head-on with agile operations and a responsive network that can scale on demand; and demand for bandwidth there will be, in abundance. From cities and transportation systems to cars and houses, and every industry you care to name, IoT is upon us. The need to transport data rapidly is upon us.

What’s the hold-up?

Telecommunications will respond with both new technologies and increasingly more aggressive competitive spirt. It will be, quite simply, a gold rush. The question must be asked, therefore, what’s holding anybody back from at least exploring their options around NFV?  Why hesitate when evidence shows that competitive companies are advanced on their virtualization journeys? Do they know something you don’t?

If there’s hesitancy in the industry, where is it coming from? There certainly will be golden opportunities for Telcos with the right network capabilities. There can be little sound rationale for not assessing what those capabilities are, and how they can be assimilated into current network architectures.

At MWC18 VMware provided not only demonstrations of how to pin down the benefits of NFV, but also showed the ease with which NFV can be adopted. Our vCloud NFV platforms, for example, enable CSPs to:

• Accelerate services deployments and foster innovation for IoT and 5G services
• Simplify operations, delivering operational intelligence and visibility across the network
• Access enormous choice through a best-in-class NFV partner ecosystem

We looked also at on-boarding, with our partners, Intel. This technical session looked at accelerated NFV adoption through open sourced tools and a community that helps remove the roadblocks of on-boarding network functions. As the year unfolds and the challenges mount, VMware can help you gain agility in the network to respond, revitalize, and reap the rewards of the opportunities ahead. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss further.

VMware and Intel are expanding their collaboration to enable cloud-optimized, 5G-ready networks with high performance and efficiency. These requirements meet the most stringent standards and service level agreements (SLAs) required by communication service providers.

Service providers are being pressed to deliver new and differentiated services faster, in an on-demand model, and maintaining a high quality of experience for the user. This requires a new architecture that blends software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), while creating a new delivery method that will support an all IP infrastructure.

Operators will get there first glance at the new types of use cases that VMware and Intel are working on at Mobile World Congress this week.

At the show, the two companies will be demonstrating several use cases that will showcase the ability to deploy telco services in a hybrid cloud environment, a multi-cloud infrastructure supporting connected drones, and the use of a distributed compute fabric at the edge that will help bring to market next generation 5G applications.

Through this collaboration, VMware and Intel will provide customers with:

Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) network acceleration that delivers market-defining performance on Intel® Xeon® processors;

• Native Intel poll mode drivers for VMware vSphere for improved throughput;
• Improved memory throughput on Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors for more efficient VNF performance;
• Enhanced Platform Awareness support to help ensure VNFs run on the optimal HW platforms;
• A new VNF Onboarding Program with a rich ecosystem of VNF vendors that have been certified through the VMware Ready for NFV program;

You can learn more about these initiatives at the Intel demo pod in the VMware booth at Mobile World Congress, Hall 3 Stand 3K10

Operators face a large learning curve and with the number of components needed to run network functions in the cloud, no single vendor can tackle this landscape alone. VMware and Intel are committed to making NFV a reality and helping Communications Service Providers accelerate the transformation of their networks.

There used to be a time not too long ago where the ‘cool’ gadgets to own were drones.  Typically, these drones were about 12 inches long and were fairly lightweight. They were fun to operate around the neighborhood with the ability to fly up to about 200 feet in the sky and had a total flight time of around 10-15 minutes before they had to be recharged. Most of these drones also had a small camera attached that allowed me to take decent pictures of the neighborhood landscape.

Today, drones have become much more than a weekend hobby.  The use of smart drones has enabled enterprises across multiple vertical segments to transform their operational models and offer new services.  Within transportation and logistics, drones can carry cargo or payloads between sites, and just recently, Amazon has been exploring delivery of goods via drones.

Another use case for drones is monitoring and surveillance.  Drones can be used to provide autonomous patrolling of a property, provide security for a specific geo-fenced area, or used to respond to alarms or emergencies in areas where a disaster or accident may have occurred.  A great company that VMware is partnering with at MWC, Nightingale Security, provides drone security, or as the experts call it, Robotic Aerial Security (RAS). Nightingale Security is at the forefront of RAS, with capabilities to fly programmed, autonomous missions around a defined perimeter and help security teams lower response times, and gain invaluable insight into potential threats.

CSPs finding new revenues in the sky

 So, what do drones have to do with Mobile World Congress, and specifically, how does VMware play a role in supporting drone services?

CSPs have the potential to provide a service, that will open up new opportunities are key to the deployment of drones.  However, to be successful, CSPs need to rethink how they can transform their network architecture to support these new services.

Let’s take an example of mission critical drone flights.  Drones are capturing hundreds of pictures, streaming ultra-HD videos, and collecting flight data and analytics that will need to be transmitted in real-time back to the base station.  Each flight mission could potentially be sending hundreds of gigabits of data back to the base station over the mobile network.  For CSPs, this requires a network that can process this data in real-time, can store this data, and in many instances also provide real-time analytics, so that the drone pilots can make decisions or react immediately to threats and emergencies.

For CSPs to successfully support these use cases, they need to ensure that these drones are operating on a network that provides ultra-low latency, ultra-high performance and be highly reliable.

5G, NFV, IoT, Network Slicing and Multi-Access Edge Computing

Yes, I just listed all the buzz words that we will be talking about non-stop at MWC.  However, for CSPs to deliver a network that can provide the scale, reliability, performance and flexibility to support drones then they will have to check all of the above.

The promise of 5G networks is not just high data rates, spectral efficiency, ultra-low latency, or even supporting the massive number of devices connected to the network.  The real value of 5G networks is to provide a platform that will deliver innovative applications and services and provide a flexible virtualized network environment, where they will have the ability to deploy an on-demand network offering tailored services to meet the unique use cases.  5G and NFV provides a flexible architecture that gives CSPs the ability to customize services tailored to the specific requirements of each service they deploy.

The concept of network slicing provides the ability to partition multiple virtual networks from a single network, providing optimal support for different types of services to serve multiple customer segments.  The key benefit of network slicing is that CSPs can deploy a network slice that will provide the connectivity, high availability and reliability, along with tuning specific network parameters to support ultra-low latency requirements for a specific service.  The other advantage with network slicing is ensuring complete security and isolation so that no other resource or outside threat can impact that network slice.  Think again of the mission critical drone services that require flying missions securely and without any service interruption.

As discussed, drones will be generating a significant amount of data and HD video.  In many cases, each flight mission can potentially send hundreds of gigabits over the mobile network.

However, delivering and processing hundreds of gigabits of data is not always feasible within the core data center, and could disrupt or degrade the quality of service for the drone mission.  This is why CSPs require a Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) architecture that will allow them to rapidly process content at the very edge of the network (closer to the drone), delivering an experience that not only provides the ultra-responsiveness as demanded by drone services, but also will optimize operational efficiencies and reduce costs as it reduces the amount of data that would otherwise have to be backhauled to the core data center.

Flying drone missions

At VMware, we have partnered with Affirmed Networks and Globetouch, to highlight how CSPs can transform their networks and provide end-to-end global coverage providing global connectivity services for IoT devices and platforms.

We will be showing live drone missions, with actual drones flying in San Francisco, CA providing live HD video streams to our booth in Barcelona over the mobile network. Within a single demo, we are able to bring together all the capabilities of network slicing, Multi-Access Edge Computing, NFV and IoT, and show how CSPs can deliver new services, while delivering the highest Quality of Service levels in the network.

It will definitely be a great experience and we can’t wait to show the smartest eye in the sky!

VMware will be in Hall 3, Stand 3K10.

We’ve been here before with LTE.  A major surge of demand for network capacity swept the telecom industry with exploding appetite for immediate access to applications and services.  Carriers, finding themselves in a race to capture revenue from new services, responded by introducing new technology as fast as they could as capital investment in access and core networks rose exponentially. As speed of network deployment became a key differentiator, operational efficiency and scalable network management struggled to keep pace. The time has come again with 5G to deliver to a much higher promise of differentiated services and quality.

With vendors rapidly transforming their software packaging to micro-services and disaggregated user/control planes, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are investing further in edge-distribution across distributed clouds. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) shared resources, multi-vendor architecture, multi-tenant slicing, elastic workloads, cross-cloud migrations, traditional and container execution units, are just a few operational considerations ahead. As the race beings again, the challenge, lies in planning and executing faster than ever before, and the operations management approach needs to be a well curated design from the onset.

VMware vCloud NFV takes a full lifecycle approach to operations management by incorporating core attributes such as simplification, multitenancy, proactivity, and efficiency across various aspects of a large-scale telco operation including Service onboarding, Service Launch, Performance monitoring, Issue isolation with machine learning, Dynamic and predictive optimization, and Capacity planning and business management.

Here, we take a closer look at this approach and discuss how integrated operations intelligence in VMware vCloud NFV facilitates simplicity, 360-degree visibility, and automation, in an agile telco network deployment.

As a global operations management function, the operational intelligence platform provides a single line-of-sight across the virtual infrastructure, overlay, and underlay networking and is fully expandable with service-awareness and physical underlays.

VMware vRealize Suite – Operations, Network Insight, and Log Insight, together make it easy to operate and manage the next generation 5G distributed NFV clouds.

Take a 5-stepped journey through the operations lifecycle management:

Onboarding Service Operations – While the 5G ready cloud infrastructure will isolate compute and networking for each customer context, the CSP operations manager will graphically define and discover the service and resource boundaries for their customers, add custom SLA triggers on top of the many existing alerts, create custom dashboards, discover and plan security micro-segmentation profiles to protect east-west and north-south traffic, and add closed-loop integrations using the workflow construction interfaces to notify a service orchestrator.

Service Launch – Once the services are up and running, monitor their health and ensure SLA’s are within check. Watch for critical alerts, capacity constraints, performance degradations, anomalies and more in the cross-tier landscape of services, virtual machines, data centers, clusters, and hosts.

Dynamic Optimization – Want to ensure services can be offered in an agile cadence, with the same stringent reliability and quality requirements? Leverage consumption patterns and available resources across hybrid clouds to optimize workloads continuously. The just-in-time operational intelligence is fed back into the NFVI Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) as well as north bound triggers to a service orchestrator to achieve predictive-class avoidance.

Issue Isolation – So you received an alert, what next? Follow the issue isolation orchestrated drill-downs into the services’ compute, storage and overlay and underlay networking. Use the automatic machine learnt intelligence to find those needles in the haystack in a single log analysis interface. See something you want to put under future observation, create an alert and dashboard with the click of a button.

Demand Planning and Expansion – Over-provisioning was the way to solve for capacity. Dynamic demand monitoring is feed into an intelligent capacity planning engine which can not only keep capacities in check but also allow you to reclaim unused resources and create what-if scenarios for future demand forecast and capacity exhaust. Evaluate the cost of private cloud operations and consider economies of a public cloud.

vCloud NFV Operational Intelligence @ MWC 2018