Huawei Completes Virtual CPE PoC Testing with BT
[Ipswich, UK, October 8, 2015] Huawei recently completed Virtual CPE Proof of Concept (PoC) testing with leading telecommunications Operator BT in the BT Research test bed at Adastral Park. BT confirmed that the Huawei vCPE solution formally passed PoC testing in the BT NFV Lab, and has agreed to move forward toward live testing.
The PoC testing passed a critical technical milestone, indicating that Huawei’s vCPE solutions are close to meeting customer technical requirements for reliability, scalability, and performance. Huawei is able to virtualize branch routers in the enterprise Data Centre, with automatic service provisioning and powerful management and monitoring systems. The Huawei system also demonstrated high availability to ensure the enterprise network service is robust.
In the PoC test environment, vCPE was implemented on Huawei COTS servers RH2288H and RH5885H, the Cloud OS used Huawei’s FusionSphere, the vCPE software used Huawei’s vNetEngine1000, the VNFM (Virtualized Network Function Management) used Huawei’s vCMM, the vCPE configuration and monitoring tool used Huawei’s U2000. The test environment established a foundation implementation that is fully compliant with ETSI NFV standard architecture.
The PoC testing has verified the model-driven service framework concept, by defining VNFD (Virtual Network Function Descriptor) and NSD (Network Service Descriptor) templates to achieve automatic batch creation of branch vCPEs. Scalability of a single server reached 100 vCPEs running simultaneously in this test. Throughput of Single vCPE was up to 40 Mbits/s. The testing also verified vCPE configuration and management on the U2000, which supports network service provisioning, QoS configuration, and comprehensive performance and alarm monitoring capabilities. The testing also simulated multiple faults in the network, to verify the automatic switchover of vCPEs from master to standby servers.
“This proof of concept clearly demonstrates the art of the possible using Huawei’s NFV and SDN products to highly automate the currently operationally intensive task of installing and maintaining branch routers on the customer premise,” said Chris Bilton, Director of BT’s Research & Innovation. “It also demonstrates the value of joint innovation between network operators and vendors.”
“The joint innovation between Huawei & BT on the vCPE solution was very successful, it demonstrated that Huawei is ready for NFV commercial deployment in carrier’s points of presence or the enterprise data centre,” Gordon Luo, CEO of Huawei UK. “The end-to-end SDN evolution plan has taken a step forward,” he added.
The vCPE solution is the first typical application of Huawei’s CloudEdge product. Besides the CloudEdge solution, Huawei also has Agile WAN and Agile Data-Centre solutions. They form three important areas in the Huawei end-to-end SDN and NFV unified architecture. In the WAN and Data-Centre areas, Huawei has implemented the RR+ Router Reflector, IP & Optical Transport SDN, CloudVPN and other SDN applications. Huawei will continue to do joint innovation with operators around the world, to explore and implement next-generation networks using SDN & NFV, helping operators use their network resources with agility and efficiency in an open environment, to provide better connectivity and service for carriers’ customers.
