(This is a summary version of a talk I gave at Intel Israel Telecom and NFV event on December 2nd, 2015. Slides are available here).

I was honored to be invited to speak on a local Intel event about Red Hat and what we are doing in the NFV space. I only had 30 minutes, so I tried to provide a high level overview of our offering, covering some main points:

  • Upstream first approach and why we believe it is a fundamental piece in the NFV journey; this is not a marketing pitch but really how we deliver our entire product portfolio
  • NFV and OpenStack; I touched on the fact that many service providers are asking for OpenStack-based solutions, and that OpenStack is the de-facto choice for VIM. That said, there are some limitations today (both cultural and technical) with OpenStack and clearly we have a way to go to make it a better engine for the telco needs
  • Full open source approach to NFV; it’s not just OpenStack but also other key projects such as QEMU/KVM, Open vSwitch, DPDK, libvirt, and the underlying Linux operating system. It’s hard to coordinate across these different communities, but this is what we are trying to do, with active participants on all of those
  • Red Hat product focus and alignment with OPNFV
  • Main use-cases we see in the market (atomic VNFs, vCPE, vEPC) with a design example of vPGW using SR-IOV
  • What telco and NFV specific features were introduced in RHEL OpenStack Platform 7 (Kilo) and what is planned for OpenStack Platform 8 (Liberty); as a VIM provider we want to offer our customers and the Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) maximum flexibility for packet processing options with PCI Passthrough, SR-IOV, Open vSwitch and DPDK-accelerated Open vSwitch based solutions.

Thanks to Intel Israel for a very interesting and well-organized event!