Huawei, China Unicom and ON.Lab launch open source partnership with MEF
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Huawei, China Unicom and ON.Lab launch open source partnership with MEF

MEF, China Unicom, ON.Lab, and Huawei are collaborating on the methodology of implementing open source solutions to speed up the transformation of telco central offices and accelerate the industry transition to Third Network services.

The partners will develop proof-of-concept use-cases that demonstrate how operators can deliver agile and orchestrated MEF-defined services using open source software and open specification hardware.

These use cases will serve as a stepping stone for deployable Third Network services that will yield productivity-enhancing benefits for end customers.

Combining open source solutions within a standardised framework and a real-world operator environment, MEF believes, will provide an opportunity to bring the economies of the data center (open source software with white box switches) and the agility of the cloud (rapid service creation) to the service provider community.

Given the huge strides forward which have been taken by the hyper converged data centre operators which have used Open Source, MEF is hurrying far-sighted telcos to climb on the Open Source bandwagon.

ON.Lab and partners have been developing Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) as an open virtualized service delivery platform for redesigned Central Offices. 

CORD combines NFV, SDN, and the flexibility of commodity clouds to bring data-centre like economics and cloud agility to the telco central Office, servers, white-box switches, and open source software defines a general and extensible platform that supports a variety of domains and business units.

China Unicom already has begun redesigning a number of its Central Offices as edge data centres with the goal of taking advantage of open source software and open specification hardware. The operator plans to introduce SDN controllers, NFV management, virtualized CPEs, an SDN-based IP access solution, and other changes. China Unicom’s service plans include the introduction of an elastic VPN service with bandwidth-on-demand capabilities, using technology solutions provided by Huawei.

Guru Parulkar, Executive Director, ON.Lab said: “ON.Lab and the CORD Project are pleased to have this opportunity to work with MEF, China Unicom, and Huawei to build and demonstrate forward-looking services on the E-CORD platform."

Ayush Sharma, Senior Vice President & CTO networks, Huawei, said: "Huawei looks forward to bringing open source and standards together as we develop key use cases with China Unicom, ON.Lab, and the MEF to deliver next-generation services.”

Third Network building blocks include service-orchestration functions, application programming interfaces (APIs), a protocol-independent NaaS information model and service definitions, all of which support agile and orchestrated Network-as-a-Service between physical and virtual endpoints.

MEF also announced this week that it has joined the China SDN/NFV Industry Alliance. The MEF and the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance today announced a memorandum of understanding establishing a high-level framework of cooperation between the two parties.

The memorandum identifies initial areas of collaboration centered on the MEF’s LSO (Lifecycle Services Orchestration) initiative as an important enabler of SDN and NFV technologies, supporting dynamic packet-based services for business and mobile applications.

The MOU was signed at the annual China SDN/NFV Conference held this week in Beijing. The MEF is participating in the event as a new member of the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance.

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