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FierceWireless.com 13 M AY 2 0 14 14 M AY 2 0 14 FierceWireless "I think we can all see how marvelous it would be if everything was virtualized and I could sort of just wave a wand and say, Connect this network to that network and scale up to this service and scale out that service," Shaw said. But moving from here to there – that's not so easy. "The ability to orchestrate all this stuff, it's going to be complicated. There's no doubt about it, there's going to have to be a fairly large ecosystem to pull all this together." The TeleManagement (TM) Forum is working with its members to create best practice case studies for NFV. Initially, TM Forum's members suggested it was too early for the forum to be jumping into the management portion of NFV because the definitions coming out of ETSI were not mature enough. That quickly changed, said Ken Dilbeck, vice president of the collaboration program at the TM Forum. Late last year, TM members said it was time to get an initiative underway. "We have definitely seen interest and desire to move this forward," Dilbeck said. The TM Forum views SDN as an implementation technology that allows NFV to be realized and its focus is on the broader management issues that surround virtualization and its impact on operators. RELAX THE 'FIVE 9S'? Some vendors have suggested that in the move to SDN/NFV—where one of the goals is faster-to-market products and services—carriers need to change their mindset and relax onerous, time-consuming concepts such as the "five 9s" (99.999 percent uptime). But it's unclear how far operators are going with that line of thinking. "I haven't seen a tremendous appetite to jump in on that, particularly in eHealth," Dilbeck said. "I think there's going to be hesitancy to introducing any kind of degradation there." Part of the reason is virtualization allows for more resiliency in terms of alternate paths when something goes down. That's important especially when you're talking about the Internet of Things and M2M -- you don't want mistakes where a heart monitor is concerned. That said, the idea of offering different service levels and paying extra for that is something that is often talked about. Consumers have come to expect a certain level of service, so it's not clear what they're willing to pay more for or how the exact service offerings would be shaped. "I don't think any operator is going to make any compromises," Lopez said. "We are aware we are dealing with critical infrastructure, more critical as time goes by. By basing the services on software, we will have different options to provide those five 9s." In fact, with the move to a virtualized architecture, the idea is to improve on service quality, not go the other way. l CAN YOUR NETWORK BOOST THE BOTTOM LINE? VIRTUALIZE The Core Network with Radisys T-Series Platforms RADISYS HEADQUARTERS 5435 NE Dawson Creek Drive | Hillsboro, OR 97124 USA 503-615-1100 | Fax 503-615-1121 | Toll-Free: 800-950-0044 | www.radisys.com | info@radisys.com T-Series Virtualized Platforms chieving network transformation is never easy. But when that transformation will result in increased service velocity, improved manageability and lower OPEX it is something worth prioritizing. However, for telecom players looking to move to SDN and NFV, it is not as easy as moving to a virtualized server. Wireless customers have come to expect telecom-grade performance. Radisys T-Series platforms deliver that performance, providing telecom application developers with the 5-9s reliability, scalable virtualization, and the dataplane throughput essential for NFV and SDN deployments today. A "I don't think any operator is going to make any compromises." DIEGO LOPEZ, ETSI NFV ISG TECHNICAL MANAGER

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