Mirantis: Telcos See Success in OpenStack for NFV
OpenStack has been finding its way into a variety of verticals for cloud deployments, but most of the deployments are focused, either solely or mostly, on devops. But in the growing cloud telecommunications market, OpenStack has found a new function—specifically, network functions virtualization (NFV), according to Mirantis.
OpenStack has been finding its way into a variety of verticals for cloud deployments, but most of the deployments are focused, either solely or mostly, on devops. But in the growing cloud telecommunications market, OpenStack has found a new function—specifically, network functions virtualization (NFV), according to Mirantis.
The OpenStack-focused vendor claims to be experiencing very strong growth in the telecommunications sector this year; and Mirantis is boasting a leadership position as the largest OpenStack provider to the sector. The telco sector is growing for Mirantis and other OpenStack vendors, but as important as the $1.6 trillion sector is, it's also interesting to see new or expanded use cases emerging.
"When you provide the phone and Internet service for millions of people, like our telecommunications customers do, you can't afford any downtime," said Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis, in a prepared statement. "Customers like Ericsson, Orange, Huawei and Pacnet turn to Mirantis OpenStack because they know that the clouds we deploy are robust enough to handle their largest workloads in-production with zero downtime. The fact that we focus exclusively on OpenStack products and services means that we have developed an unmatched level of expertise across a broad range of standards and use cases, across the ecosystem."
Whereas OpenStack is traditionally launched for devops, Mirantis that telcos are increasingly using it for NFV features. For instance, Pacnet is one of those telcos to use OpenStack for NFV and software-defined networking (SDN) purposes.
"We use Mirantis OpenStack as the cloud infrastructure for Pacnet Enabled Network, our network-as-a-service platform," explained Jim Fagan, president of Managed Services at Pacnet, in a prepared statement. "Customers' growing need for a flexible, intelligent network has served as the key driver of our PEN development, which leverages both SDN and NFV to enable the deployment of the high performance and cloud-ready networks demanded by today's ever growing hybrid cloud environment. The complementary effect of combining SDN and NFV capabilities in the PEN platform puts the control of the network into the hands of our customers."
