Cisco NFV Infrastructure At-a-Glance

Accelerate Your Network Infrastructure Transformation with Cisco NFV Infrastructure

The Cisco® NFV Infrastructure Solution provides the compute, storage, networking infrastructure, and management and assurance capabilities to run network function virtualization (NFV) network services. It is a fully integrated solution that is tested and validated by Cisco. It’s a carrier-grade and robust solution that delivers high performance, availability, security, and scalability. The Cisco NFVI Solution builds a solid foundation that will improve cost efficiency, enable faster service deployment, and unlock new revenues.

The Shifting Landscape

The combination of market conditions and network constraints is demanding the telecommunications industry to pursue a cloud-based model much like that adopted by the IT industry in order to simplify network operation, foster innovation, and increase long-term profitability. Network function virtualization (NFV) promises to transform the telecommunications industry.

Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure

As defined in ETSI’s reference architecture, the Network Function Virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) is a primary building block that enables the implementation environment for NFV. It provides a virtualized infrastructure for virtual network functions (VNF).

Cisco NFV Infrastructure

As the industry leader in cloud infrastructure and cloud services, Cisco has joined forces with number-one enterprise open source software provider Red Hat along with Intel to create a fully open platform to address carriers’ biggest business and technology challenges. The Cisco® NFV Infrastructure Solution is ETSI compliant and preintegrated. It offers carrier-grade high availability, reliability, and predictable performance to make sure of high-level customer SLAs.

Cisco NFV Infrastructure Building Blocks

• Compute: Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) for a carrier class and reliable compute infrastructure.
• Storage: Cisco UCS hardware and CEPH provide reliable storage. The user has the options to introduce additional storage as capacity needs grow.
• Networking: Cisco Nexus® 9000 series hardware provides high throughput, low latency, and rich feature sets.
• Virtualized Infrastructure: Fully integrated Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenStack Platform runs on top of Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®). It is open source yet hardened and mature.
• Management: Cisco UCS Director functions as a unified management tool across multiple virtual environments. SDN controller is optional.

Cisco NFV Infrastructure Architecture