Etisalat, a telecom provider in the Middle East, has activated its first live Network Function Virtualization (NFV) telco cloud in Abu Dhabi.
The latest project, which was deployed along with Chinese giant Huawei, is part of the company’s efforts for technological leadership in the region and worldwide. The NFV-based telco infrastructure involved several components and has been architected with Quanta servers, Arista switches and Canonical Ubuntu OpenStack, a multi-vendor combination integrated for production for the first time ever globally.
The genesis of this project began in 2013, with the telecom industry’s fostering and adoption of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), two enabling technologies commonly associated with smart cities, IoT and the upcoming 5G future.
The Telco cloud is based on the open-source OpenStack cloud platform, which is also used by NASA, CERN and other leading web companies. On top of this telco cloud, the telecom operator is targeting the virtualization of its infrastructure and services across its portfolios of data, communications and video, beginning with mobile services, to efficiently make telecom resources and services more fluid, automatic and open for innovation.