Red Hat and NEC collaborate

As communication service providers (CSPs) transform their businesses and modernize both their infrastructure and offerings, NFV enables them to deliver customer-facing services more easily and faster, with increased demand capacity. NEC's NFV capabilities integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, are designed to enable CSPs to successfully implement these modernization plans.

NEC and Red Hat have collaborated for more than a decade on joint open source software development. In recent years, the companies have focused their efforts on NFV system integration with OpenStack, leveraging NEC's extensive knowledge of telecom networks. This enables the acceleration of NFV features in OpenStack and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) in order to achieve carrier-grade and carrier-scale systems, including data plane acceleration through the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). Moreover, these efforts are being contributed to the upstream OpenStack community, to enable Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to emerge as a leading cloud platform for NFV. Several of the NFV features resulting directly from this collaboration were included in the OpenStack Juno release, or are planned for the forthcoming OpenStack Kilo release.

Now, Red Hat and NEC aim to deliver a reliable, open, and scalable cloud platform for CSPs based on OpenStack, helping them to take advantage of NFV's full potential. NEC's NFV system integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform will be designed to deliver mobile packet core virtualization, also known as virtualized Evolved Packet Core, or vEPC, as well as virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE). NEC and Red Hat plan to continue the expanded collaboration to integrate and optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and NFV, along with contributions to open source communities, including OpenStack and Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV).