Enea® (NASDAQ OMX Nordic: ENEA) today announced Enea® NFV Access – a lightweight virtualization platform tailored for customer premise deployment at the network edge. Enea NFV Access is optimized for minimal footprint, and high throughput for virtual network functions (VNFs) running in KVM and Docker containers. Enea NFV Access supports both ARM and x86 white boxes enabling operators and service providers to meet a wider range of price and performance point while still using the same platform and management interfaces.

Enea NFV Access is architected to meet the special challenges of virtualization on edge devices. Without the need for a full OpenStack deployment, Enea NFV Access is a truly light-weight platform. It runs, together with VNFs, on as little as two cores without sacrificing throughput or performance. Support for container virtualization increases VNF density and minimizes total system footprint. In addition, NFV Access enables mixing containers and virtual machines on the same platform which provides flexibility as well as a migration path from VMs to Containers.

Main components include virtualization through KVM and Docker, optimized vSwitch, a full FCAPS management solution, VNF lifecycle management, Service Function Chaining capacity and an optimized data plane enabling 10G line rate from VMs and Containers. It uses open and standard interfaces, making it completely hardware agnostic and fully portable, supporting interoperability for leading VNFs.

VNF Lifecycle Management and Service Function Chaining is done over a variety of northbound interfaces (NETCONF, REST, OpenStack and Docker) that either interface orchestration directly, or interface a control node in a central office or point-of-presence (PoP). With the variety of northbound interfaces, Enea NFV Access easily fits into existing networks and orchestration solutions, limiting the effort to virtualize network functions at the edge.

"We see tremendous opportunities at the edge, and we have purpose built Enea NFV Access for common vCPE use case challenges", said Karl Mörner, SVP Product Management. "Enea NFV Access is deployment ready, contributing to CapEx and OpEx savings, and offers proven solutions for standards based service orchestration and model based network function management systems."

Together with the previously announced Enea NFV Core platform, Enea addresses three vCPE deployment scenarios:

• Central office and point-of-presence with Enea NFV Core,
• Customer premise deployment with Enea NFV Access, and
• A distributed scenario with a combination of both platforms.