Hong Kong, —July 8, 2015—Altera Corporation announced the company has joined the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), a carrier-grade, integrated, open source flexible platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using NFV (network function virtualization).As an open source project, OPNFV is positioned to bring together the work of standards bodies, open source communities and commercial suppliers to deliver a de facto standard open source NFV platform for the industry.
NFV uses IT virtualization technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may be connected, or chained, to create communication services. Altera will join working groups inside the OPNFV to expand the use of FPGA accelerators in virtual machines running different software and processes on top of industry-standard, high-volume servers, storage and cloud computing infrastructure.
“FPGAs can be used to ‘super-charge’ virtual machine applications while saving on power, making them an excellent fit for the NFV industry,” said Francis Chow, vice president and general manager of the Communications Business Unitfor Altera.“At the same time, FPGAs can reduce capital and operational expenditures,speed service and improve product introduction times for NFV applications, providing a more efficient solution.”
FPGAs act as accelerators by offloadingcompute workloads, usingless power than general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) and central processor units (CPUs)—which helps data centers run cooler.FPGA- and SoC-based solutions are already accelerating servers in the data center in search and convolutional neural networks applications.
“OPNFV is about collaboration from a diverse group of players from across the industry to craft an open platform that we can all use to accelerate NFV,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “We are excited to welcome new silver member, Altera, who is poised to help us implement the goals of open source NFV.”
The OPNFV’s Work Benefits Service Providers
Initial interest in working with the OPNFV has come from the network service provider community, including OPNFV founding members AT&T, China Mobile, NTT DOCOMO, Telecom Italia and Vodafone, among others. In addition, other industries, such as the financial services industry, large enterprises and cloud service providersare showing interest in exploiting the NFV benefits.
