“In the data center there is an immediate ROI [return on investment] to simplification,” says Stephen Collins, vice president of product marketing and business development at Active Broadband Networks, adding that the industry has turned its attention toward figuring out “how SDN can be deployed across the network.”

SDN for CSPs = NFV

However, before SDN can continue on its evolutionary path, the telecommunications industry can’t resist engaging in its favorite activity (outside of generating profits, that is): coming up with three-letter acronyms. Yes, SDN has received another rebranding, this time as NFV, or network functions virtualization. 

NFV, which can and often does work in tandem with SDN, is virtualized networking for service providers. Most of the effort toward pushing network virtualization focuses on both SDN and NFV; together with the cloud, they offer a potent antidote to hardware maintenance, upkeep and upgrade.

“SDN has attracted a lot of attention from network operators, who want to benefit from the advantages offered by this technology,” says Josef Urban, head of software technology at Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN). “SDN in carrier networks promises, for example, better utilization of transport network resources and increased automation in managing network services. In addition, cloud technologies and the virtualization of network functions have already stimulated operators’ interest for a while. Network-functions virtualization and cloud computing are independent from SDN but complement each other to form a powerful game-changing triple approach for network operators.”

And boy, has NFV grabbed attention. According to Infonetics’s aforementioned SDN survey, the network-domain operators who say they plan to use SDN and NFV by next year are:

• within data centers;
• between data centers
• in operations and management;
• content delivery networks;
• cloud services.

Each deployment pushes SDN ever closer to the ultimate goal: a virtual network core. But in the meantime there are many strides being made from many network points of view toward that end.

According to an October 2012 white paper on NFV published by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), there are some specific technical challenges when it comes to deployment in service providers’ networks:

• “achieving high performance virtualised network appliances which are portable between different hardware vendors ...”;
• “achieving co-existence with bespoke hardware based network platforms whilst enabling an efficient migration path to fully virtualised network platforms which re-use network operator OSS/BSS”;
• “managing and orchestrating many virtual network appliances (particularly alongside legacy management systems) while ensuring security from attack and misconfiguration”;
• “Network Functions Virtualisation will only scale if all of the functions can be automated”;
• “ensuring the appropriate level of resilience to hardware and software failures”;
• “integrating multiple virtual appliances from different vendors ... network operators need to be able to ‘mix & match’ hardware from different vendors....”