Industry analyst firm Infonetics Research recently published its annual report on “IMS Service Strategies and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey.” In a synopsis of the report that Infonetics shared on its website, a quote from Diane Myers, research director for VoIP, UC and IMS at IHS, jumped out at me.
Diane wrote, “One of the biggest drivers for NFV is the ability to scale services up and down quickly and introduce new network services more efficiently and in a timely manner, which makes IMS a good early fit for NFV.”
At Radisys, we’ve seen this statement bear out in the growing demand we are seeing for our Virtualized MRF (vMRF) as mobile operators turn to NFV in their transition to a software-centric network. A critical step toward virtualizing the IMS is for the MRF to run on a hypervisor, side-by-side with other virtualized IMS functions and applications running on the same server hardware. And as reported by Infonetics, this is a key step that many vendors have only just begun to explore.
Radisys has already taken that step. Our vMRF is designed for rapid deployment using an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) package. It runs on VMware and KVM hypervisors today, with growing support for OpenStack.
At Mobile World Congress this year, Nokia demonstrated our vMRF running on a hypervisor as part of its VoLTE cloud demo (see photo). We announced in January that Nokia had standardized on Radisys’ MRF portfolio as the media processing foundation for its OpenTAS VoLTE/VoWiFi solution.
This same vMRF also was selected by ZTE as the MRF for its cloud-based IMS solution, delivering real-time multimedia processing for ZTE’s IMS deployments worldwide. Our vMRF has also been configured and successfully deployed in Amazon EC2 cloud. Radisys and one of its partners have already successfully deployed a WebRTC application in an Amazon EC2 for a tier-one mobile virtual network operator (MVNO).
Delivering virtualized media processing for telecom cloud deployments isn’t easy. This is where our historic engineering strengths as the media processing leader has helped us get ahead of the pack to deliver reliable media processing in NFV environments today – even under high system load. And more importantly, our vMRF offering helps mobile operators introduce new revenue-generating services today and will serve as the media processing solution of tomorrow.
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