Stockholm-based Enea, a supplier of network software platforms, announced the introduction of Enea NFV Core, a high performance, deployment-ready NFV software platform designed to enable central office virtualisation at the network edge.
Enea's new NFV Core software is designed to allow network operators, service providers and telecom and network equipment vendors to develop solutions enabling a virtualised network edge that can deliver lower costs and increased flexibility in creating new services.
Enea noted that while the data centre/cloud side of NFV software is maturing and becoming commoditised, in the base station and customer premise equipment segment there are currently few independent software vendors with viable offerings. In addition, there is significant potential for differentiation as the use cases differ for each deployment scenario.Enea aims to address typical distributed NFV use cases such as virtual CPE (vCPE), and the new Enea NFV Core platform targets central office applications. The solution provides multi-architecture support that enables virtualised network functions (VNF) to execute on both Intel x86 and ARM commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware.
Enea NFV Core is based on the open technology standards OPNFV and OpenStack, and so can benefit from the speed of innovation provided by the open source community. However, Enea noted that unlike open source offerings NFV Core is hardened and deployment-ready, which speeds development time.
The Enea NFV Core software has been configured, enhanced and optimised to deliver the performance and availability required for edge use cases, and has been integrated, tested and validated.
At MWC 2017, Enea partnered with Lanner Electronics to demonstrate a proof-of-concept of a commercial NFV solution for vCPE built on OPNFV and able to run on x86 and ARM-based COTS hardware. The PoC involved Enea running its network virtualisation software on a central office server that sets up and initiates a video call between two tablets, one connected to an x86-based Lanner device, and one connected to an ARM-based device.
