Openet presentation at ETIS Community Gathering 2014

1. VIRTUALISING THE BSS STACK
Andrew Keene, Director of Product Management, Openet
Stephen O’Loughlin, Charging Solutions Manager, Openet
17 October 2014

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Part 1 – V is
for
Virtualisation
Part 2 –
Realities of
NFV
Part 3 –
Trends and
Directions

3. The world of computing has gone
through rapid changes in recent years
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4. This has lead to great improvements in how
software is created, deployed, managed and
used but how does this relate to mobile
networks?
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5. Virtualization to the Rescue
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6. Virtualization and NFV
have the potential to
revolutionise how
networks are built and
managed
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7. VIRTUALISATION, CLOUD & NFV PROMISES
• Reduce management and equipment costs
• Decrease overall complexity
• Increase scalability
• Promote the use of multi-tenancy
• Enable new services and ability to trial new business models
• Promote openness and therefore reduce vendor lock in
• Reduce deployment times of new applications
• Allow trialling and rapid deployment of new business models
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8. KEY BENEFITS OF BSS VIRTUALIZATION
• Virtualization: create a virtual version of a computing resource
• Removes one-to-one dependency of BSS software on specific hardware
• Easier creation, scaling and management of instances of BSS solutions
• NFV (Network Functions Virtualization): initiative by operators (2012)
• Virtualization technology
• Consolidate network equipment onto industry standard high volume hardware
• Network functions in software
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• Extending virtualization/NFV to BSS
• Accelerate service innovation
• Learn fast and minimize risk
• Facilitate new business models
• Optimize costs

9. BUSINESS DRIVERS FOR BSS VIRTUALIZATION
• Operators will be “using virtualization to drive innovative service creation, especially the
creation of services and apps that require time to market intervals of only days, even
hours.”
• “Many operators view NFV as a key ingredient in their OSS/BSS transformation objectives,
offering an escape from the legacy 12-24 month service creation cycles that handicap their
long-term competitiveness”
Source: 2014 OSS/BSS Investment Trends: Top Operator Drivers and Priorities, Current Analysis
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10. BENEFIT 1: ACCELERATE SERVICE INNOVATION
• Virtualization: Simplifies and accelerate service deployment process
• Easier to deploy and manage software/BSS
• No need to create a full new hardware based environment for each service introduction,
with full procure-design-integrate-test-deploy cycle
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• No separate test environment
• Test and launch on the same infrastructure
• Test to scale production reduced from weeks to hours
• Services can be rapidly scaled up or down
• Rapidly deploy targeted services
based on geography or customer sets

11. BENEFIT 2: LEARN FAST AND MINIMIZE RISKS
• Test new services with minimum risk/disruption (73.4% operators)
• Easy to roll out or roll back services
• Resources can easily be re-allocated
• Easy to go from small scale trial to full scale production
• In-service upgrades and modifications: faster, minimum disruption
• Adoption of open standards with BSS software and NFV
• Removes vendor lock-in and reduce needs for vendor specific skills
• Simplifies integration of new components to the existing network
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12. BENEFIT 3: OPTIMIZE COSTS (OPEX & CAPEX)
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• Reduce hardware costs
• Consolidate hardware
• Standard hardware instead of proprietary
• Simplified, faster deployment process
• Optimize hardware utilization
• Multiple applications can co-exist on the same physical
server
• Hardware does no longer need to be permanently
dedicated to a specific application or purpose
• Hardware only needed for occasional peak load can be re-allocated
during off peak periods

13. NFV – CHALLENGES FOR OPERATORS
• Potentially complex migration path from current network to all
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virtualized network
• Performance impacts of virtualization
• More of an issue for data-plane nodes
• Lack of virtualization expertise in many vendors
• Achieving required levels of reliability on industry standard hardware
which may require mobile operators embracing different
reliability/failover mechanisms
• Disparate community who must produce common management and
orchestration layers
• Increased benefits of NFV occur when the entire network is created in an
NFV manner; something that will take some time

14. Management of Stateful
Orchestration Storage Mechanism
Session Data
Policy & Charging
Virtualization
Routing/Load
Balancing
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Management
Deployment
Mechanism
Upgrades
Scalability
Performance
High Availability Hypervisors

15. Logical Scalable Units Data and Storage
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Management
& Orchestration
Routing

16. PROTECT LEGACY BSS INVESTMENT
• Mobile operators want to protect legacy BSS
investments made over many years
• Operators want to squeeze the last drop of ROI out
of legacy BSS investments
• This approach can be to the detriment of project
timelines and stymie real innovation
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17. SINGLE SUPPLIER STRATEGIES SHRINKING
• Rigid mobile operator processes beget rigid BSS systems
• Agility needs to be more than a buzzword to enable new
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business models
• Single supplier strategies ≠ Agility
• Mobile operators persist with NEM’s in spite of a lack of
domain expertise that a specialist BSS vendor can bring

18. BSS TRANSFORMATION AND VIRTUALIZATION
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19. VIRTUALIZATION IN ACTION: AT&T’S DOMAIN 2.0
In September 2013, AT&T launched the next generation
of its Supplier Domain Program – Domain 2.0 –
triggering a swift and broad move to a modern, cloud-based
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architecture.
AT&T plans to simplify and scale its network by:
• Separating hardware and software functionality;
• Separating network control plane and forwarding
planes; and
• Improving management of functionality in the
software layer.

20. FUTURE NETWORK VISION: PATH OF ADOPTION
Time
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21. THANK YOU