China Mobile, the largest mobile carrier in China with over 850 million subscribers, ARM, Cavium and Enea announced an agreement covering collaboration in the China Mobile Open NFV Testlab leveraging Enea's OPNFV-based commercial NFV Core platform and Cavium's ARM-based ThunderX workload-optimised data centre server processors.
Through the agreement, China Mobile's Open NFV Testlab will host the platform as part of the operator's Telecom Integrated Cloud (TIC) initiative. The work will specifically encompass validation of a range of NFV tests cases, including virtualised CPE (vCPE), vBRAS, vEPC and vIMS, while also supporting development and integration within the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project.
Enea NFV Core is a carrier-grade virtualisation software platform based on OPNFV and OpenStack. It is designed to enable the deployment and management of vCPE network functions in central offices and data centres utilising generic hardware platforms. The NFV Core is optimised for the vCPE use case and central office deployments and is designed to offer the performance, reliability and flexibility required in next generation telecom networks.
Commenting on the agreement, Raj Singh VP and GM, network and communication group at Cavium, said, "(The) collaboration with China Mobile will enable key NFV functionality and drive NFV towards large scale deployment… telco applications with compute, I/O and real time processing requirements demand scalable and optimised processing solutions… advanced COTS hardware such as Cavium's ThunderX server processors… provide scalable NFV solutions using standard software and ecosystems".
While Noel Hurley, VP and GM, networking and servers, business segments group at ARM, noted, "ARM and its ecosystem of partners (are) committed to enabling OPNFV to bring efficient and cost-effective compute power for data networks… the network pipeline must be expanded at scale to support new computing across all markets in the most efficient way... the ecosystem delivers efficiency through integrated solutions that demonstrate the performance-per-watt, density and TCO provided by ARM technology".
