High Availability and Fault Tolerance
Before NFV and SDN become mainstream, stateful high availability and fault tolerance will need to be addressed. With the rise of mobile phones and VoIP, the telecom industry has become complacent – so much so that some people now accept that it is okay to "drop and reconnect" a voice call. Compare that to the days when the telecom network was considered rock solid – when dropped calls were not allowed and the dial-tone was as reliable as the sun rising in the East every day.
Now, service continuity and stateful fault tolerance are even more critical, as telcos make plans to virtualize stateful firewalls and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation solutions, as well as the need to accommodate an incoming tide of IoT devices that will need to send and receive critical status and state information across the network.
Software-based stateful fault tolerance and automated resiliency in NFV/SDN telco clouds are critical to the success of these efforts. Telcos will also need a total availability platform where applications can be deployed, monitored and controlled as fault-tolerant, high availability and/or general availability, with the capability to dynamically adjust the level of availability based on the needs of each application.