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7 Predictions on How NFV and SDN Will Mature

  • 7 Predictions on How NFV and SDN Will Mature-

    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.

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7 Predictions on How NFV and SDN Will Mature

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  • 7 Predictions on How NFV and SDN Will Mature-6

    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.

According to many industry analysts and influencers, software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are the technology game changers in 2015, especially within the telecommunications industry. Why?

According to estimates by research firm Gartner, global IP traffic has increased by a factor of five over the past five years, and will continue to increase threefold over the next five years. However, telecoms services revenues fell by 1.2 percent in 2013 to $1.62 trillion, and grew less than 1 percent in 2014. Thanks to the growth of the Internet of Things, an increasing number of devices and applications are connecting to the network, forcing telcos to find new ways for the network to cope. This has created a need to make networks more flexible and programmable to support this increasing need for data and bandwidth. But questions remain: Are these technologies still in their infancy, or will they become the de facto network architecture by the end of 2015, as some claim? How far and how fast will these technologies really have evolved by December?

In this slideshow, Ali Kafel, senior director and head of telecom business development for Stratus Technologies, offers seven predictions for how NFV and SDN will mature by the end of 2015.