Events like this week’s Layer 123 NFV World Congress provide a great opportunity to engage with a broad spectrum of the global Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualizations (NFV) ecosystem and to reflect on its progress, challenges and goals. Based on my conversations here and at prior events this year such as Mobile World Congress 2016, I believe that the NFV industry’s sentiment is firmly shifting from intent to action. Paraphrasing Geoffrey Moore, I am seeing strong evidence that starting in 2016 the SDN/NFV market has crossed the chasm and is rapidly moving from early adopters to an early majority of communication service providers.

My team and I have been carefully observing the progress of the market and are now excited to count over 40 global deployments with 200 more in the near-term pipeline. Industry analysts I’ve had conversations with are estimating that almost half of the Intel® Architecture servers sold in the telecommunication vertical are being deployed for SDN and NFV production use cases.

From an Intel perspective, our engagement strategy in SDN and NFV has remained steady in the last two years. We strongly believe that advancing meaningful open source community and standards development efforts in this space can help resolve complex technology challenges for everyone. We are committed to providing reference architectures such as the Intel® Open Network Platform (ONP) which can assist with the rapid prototyping and performance characterization of key NFV scenarios. And we continue to work with a number of our partners within the Intel® Network Builders community to showcase what is possible in SDN and NFV in a series of innovative proof-of-concept initiatives.

These innovation initiatives are anchored in the latest Intel® Architecture innovation. From the latest Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 family delivering up to 44% increased performance to new orchestration centric software solutions such as the Intel® Resource Director (RDT) and higher performant security solutions delivering up to 70% greater encryption performance*, our next generation products are a core element of SDN and NFV success.

We optimize our solutions for a range of deployed use cases. These include virtual consumer premise equipment (vCPE) production environments that are based on a variety of virtual network functions (VNFs) such as virtual firewalls, routers, and intrusion prevention systems. The use of the Intel® Architecture optimized VNFs allows the creation of entirely new use cases for communication service providers such as trial-based and on-demand software services.

For the first time, the Layer 123 event this week also showcased broad industry agreement on the importance of enhanced platform awareness (EPA) as a core performance and security element for SDN and NFV success. EPA remains a core focus for Intel OpenStack Networking team as well as the various management and orchestration community initiatives such as Open Source MANO and Open-O to which we are contributing.

I invite you to climb out of the chasm to deploy SDN and NFV using Intel’s elements for success. For more information, please go here.

Listen to the latest episode of Chip Chat to hear more about how open source projects like Open Source MANO (OSM) and FD.io “Fido” are bringing community of innovators together to expand and add more features and functionalities based on open standards for interoperability.





*Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. For more complete information visit https://www.intel.com/performance.
Up to 44% faster Aerospace Computational Fluid Dynamics workload calculations based on ISV CFD workload (tested by ISV and Intel) comparing 1-Node, 2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2697 v3 with 1-Node, 2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2697 v4
Up to 70% per core speed up claim based on RSA 4096 bits (Sign) (testing by Intell) with 2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2697 v3 at 21465370 cycles/op compared to 2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2699 v4 at 12961765 cycles/op. Lower is better.

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