Vodafone in NFV deal with Mirantis

Vodafone Hutchison Australia network
Open cloud company Mirantis announced its network virtualisation (NFV) deal with telecom operator Vodafone.

Supporting Vodafone’s network virtualisation program, Mirantis will deliver managed OpenStack, based on Mirantis Cloud Platform.

“Mirantis was selected for its technology, innovation and leadership in the OpenStack community and its ability to work with different vendors, engineers and operations teams to deliver OpenStack-based VIM,” said David Amzallag, head of Network Virtualization, SDN and NFV, Vodafone Group.’

The company said it will be part of Vodafone Ocean, a framework for developing, testing and deploying Software-defined networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies. Mirantis Managed OpenStack departs from the traditional software-centric method that revolves around licensing and support subscriptions.

Mirantis is pioneering an operations-centric approach, where open infrastructure is delivered with operations service level agreements (SLAs) owned by either Mirantis or the customer. Software updates are introduced in minor increments on a weekly basis and with no down time.

“With Mirantis Managed OpenStack, Vodafone and their customers will have access to the most recent cloud innovations, without having the downtime associated with upgrades,” said Alex Freedland, Mirantis CEO.

Mirantis has signed a procurement agreement to deliver managed open cloud for Vodafone Cloudstore, with the first implementation already underway.

“We tested Mirantis products through proof of concept and pilot projects and the excellent quality of service led us to choose Mirantis for our Milan datacentre,” said Pablo Jejcic, head of Cloud and Infrastructure, Vodafone Group.

US-based telecom operator AT&T alone is already supporting customers with OpenStack in nearly 100 data centers, alongside carriers like Verizon, China Mobile and Deutsche Telekom.

“OpenStack is the most widely distributed cloud infrastructure for virtualized networks, and the Vodafone deal is the most recent example,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, OpenStack Foundation.