CDN Breakthroughs

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the founding of the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV). OPNFV will be a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are part of the overall industry shift towards network and application virtualization. Together they are expected to dramatically change the networking landscape, allowing providers to deliver new services to their customers more quickly while significantly reducing both operating and capital expenditures. These technologies bring both cloud computing and Information Technology (IT) capabilities and benefits into the telecom industry, enabling new levels of flexibility and business growth opportunities for providers. Service provider applications have different demands than most IT applications, so an open platform integrating multiple open source components and ensuring continuous testing for carrier-grade service performance is essential to this transition.

OPNFV will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components. Because multiple open source NFV building blocks already exist, OPNFV will work with upstream projects to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.

At TV Connect, Edgeware is demoing the Orbit Unified Server Software running on two hardware platforms. In addition to Edgeware's existing Orbit 3020 hardware platform, this includes Edgeware's latest Orbit 3080 platform, providing up to 80Gbps aggregate throughput per rack unit to both networks from a single set of caching servers. Edgeware's Convoy Software provides all control and management for both delivery types from a single, virtualized application running in a shared data-center or private cloud. By creating a centralized, logical view of all network resources, this SDN architecture enables operators to dynamically provision capacity and to optimize video session routing for the highest-possible quality of experience (QoE) regardless of any rapid change in the mix of video services. A key example for prioritizing is live streaming to premium sports customers.