Telecom Lead India: ConteXtream has unveiled its Grid software, a network virtualization solution for wireless service provider networks.
Mobile operators will benefit as the network virtualization solution offers the benefits of Software-Defined Networking (SDN).
The virtualization solution also adds support for Evolved Packet Core (EPC) virtualization.
Moreover, Grid software facilitates elastic provisioning of network capacity and its dynamic allocation to multiple enterprise customers based on their exact needs, much like multi-tenant cloud providers do for other infrastructure services.
“Mobile data consumption is driving demand for wireless services at a pace never before seen. Until now, the only way to deal with increasing bandwidth requirements has been to add physical infrastructure,” said Craig Mathias, principal at the wireless and mobile advisory firm Farpoint Group.
Benefits of the Grid software for service provider networks:
- Conversion of fixed costs associated with infrastructure acquisition, maintenance, and over-provisioning, to variable costs that can be charged to network users based on actual usage
- High availability and reliability by leveraging cloud architecture and design principles that aggregate a large number of small processing elements to build a massive, global, scalable infrastructure
- Reduced infrastructure costs by leveraging commodity hardware for all EPC components and separating software and hardware upgrade and replacement cycles
- Greater utilization of infrastructure by matching capacity with demand, raising asset utilization from today’s sub 20 percent mark to greater than 80 percent
- Ability to layer SDN around current infrastructure solutions, avoiding the need to rip-and-replace network hardware
- Apply network-wide policies that allow new business models and pricing plans for bulk service offered to enterprise customers
SDN is the key to solving both capacity and scalability challenges.
ConteXtream’s Grid software virtualizes the wireless carriers’ core network, enabling them to realize the benefits of SDN within their existing infrastructure to reduce costs and create new revenue opportunities.
The Grid software is designed to control traffic flows through the carrier network using a distributed controller and virtual switches to load balance traffic on all EPC resources, whether they are physical or virtual and whether they are hosted within the carrier network or in a third party cloud operator.
ConteXtream said that the software allows telecom service providers to control network costs, by cloud-bursting into third-party Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, allowing for the increase and decrease of network capacity to meet demand.
The new Grid software supports layer 4-7 switching logic based on protocols commonly used within the 3GPP architecture. The Grid supports multi-tenancy.
“With ConteXtream’s Grid software service providers can better serve the enterprise market. It allows carriers to price and enforce bulk network service to all the diverse devices an enterprise may have, while allocating the exact resources required to serve the enterprise and meet their service level agreements,” said Joel Brand, vice president of marketing at ConteXtream.
