Genre: Promotion

Service Provider Featured Article CloudBand Ecosystem Program Promotes Network Virtualization Network functions virtualization ( NFV ) has the potential to dramatically change the telecommunications industry and drive increased agility and efficiency . While the promise of a virtualized network infrastructure is great , it also has the potential to disrupt the business models of service providers and vendors that service the industry . Rather than run from NFV , however , Alcatel-Lucent ( News - Alert ) has gotten behind the revolution and launched a program to bring together vendors and service providers in a partnership to evolve the industry , known as the CloudBand Ecosystem Program . CloudBand is the market's first NFV platform , according to the company , both open and multivendor while being stringent enough to accommodate the strict needs of carriers . With the CloudBand Ecosystem Program , Alcatel-Lucent is making CloudBand available to the entire industry for free in a move to foster collaboration and experimentation that will accelerate adoption of NFV . This program will help service providers collaborate with each other and application vendors in a cloud partner ecosystem , accelerate NFV transformation through the leveraging of best-of-breed NFV vendors , and speed service deployment , according to the company . Some of the examples of what NFV can already do for the industry include CloudBand's virtual load balancer , authoritative domain and caching name service ( DNS ) , firewall , and session border controller ( SBC ) . " In a cloud environment , a virtual network function such as a software-based virtual load balancer appliance is a basic , yet fundamental building block to integrate network services with application delivery , " noted an Alcatel-Lucent case study . " They can be rapidly provisioned on demand , when and where needed through self-service mechanisms , making them a very useful , simple and cost-effective tool to fully optimize application delivery . " The continued rapid growth in DNS queries makes DNS another area ripe for virtualization . " Given the critical role this infrastructure plays in ensuring customer experience and reducing churn , relying on legacy hardware with closed interfaces , poor scalability and inflexible provisioning mechanisms is no longer viable , " according to the company . Virtual firewalls is a further area where NFV makes obvious sense , in that such firewalls can be rapidly deployed when and where needed independent of physical locations or boundaries , then stitched together with other virtual or physical network services though the network functions virtualization concept of service chaining . A fourth example given by Alcatel-Lucent is the SBC . The SBC is well suited to cloud deployment as it can be fully virtualized and deployed on a NFV such as CloudBand . " Cloud deployment eliminates the need for closed , customized or proprietary hardware . The common , distributed infrastructure – with centralized management and orchestration – can be shared between many similar carrier-specific applications to achieve economies of scale , " noted Alcatel-Lucent . These and other network functions can already be virtualized with CloudBand . With the CloudBand Ecosystem Program , the list will undoubtedly get longer .