Network function virtualization (NFV) is clearly on the rise, with an increasing number of production deployments across carriers worldwide. Operators are looking to create nimble, software-led topologies that can deliver services on-demand and reduce operational costs. From a data center performance standpoint, there’s a problem: Traditional IT virtualization approaches that have worked for cloud and enterprise data centers can’t cost-effectively support the I/O-centric and latency-sensitive workloads that carriers require.
NFV, as the name suggests, involves abstracting the underlying hardware from specific network functionalities. Where a stack was once a siloed on proprietary piece of hardware, virtual functions are created in software and can be run on x86 servers in a data center. Workloads can be shifted around as needed and network resources are spun up on-demand by whatever workload is asking for it. This fluid, just-in-time approach to provisioning services has significant upside in the carrier world, where over-provisioned pools of resources have always been the norm, and where hardware-tied infrastructure has historically made “service agility” an oxymoron. But there’s a bugbear ruining this rosy future-view: data center performance concerns.
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