HP Partners With Wind River To Create 'Carrier-Grade' HP Helion Platform For NFV

Hewlett-Packard said Tuesday it's integrating Wind River technology into HP Helion to make the OpenStack cloud platform more "carrier-grade" and pave the way for service providers to adopt network functions virtualization (NFV).

Through the HP and Wind River partnership, unveiled Tuesday at the OpenStack Summit in Paris, Wind River's Linux solution and KVM hypervisor will be integrated with Helion. Other Wind River capabilities, such as those for network security and the scheduling and orchestration of workloads, also will be added to the platform.

HP said the integrated Wind River-Helion solution will be available on a rolling basis throughout 2015.

[Related: HP To Take On Cisco, Juniper With New Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Unit ]

According to Saar Gillai, senior vice president and COO of HP Cloud and head of HP's new NFV unit, the integration of Wind River solutions into HP Helion will make the platform more attractive to carriers, boosting both its performance and reliability.

"It's providing things that will give [carriers] high availability, deterministic behavior, strong performance and visibility -- they want that all on OpenStack with Linux and KVM," Gillai said.

Gillai noted that the integrated Wind River and Helion platform will enable carriers to more quickly embrace NFV, a complementary technology to software-defined networking (SDN). NFV specifically virtualizes layer 4-7 network functions, such as firewalls and load balancing.

NFV is being embraced especially by telecom carriers and service providers, who can use the technology to accelerate the deployment of new services and compete more effectively against "over-the-top" content providers like Google or Skype.

"NFV is really about giving the carriers the same agility of their competition," Gillai said, noting that there are roughly 20 carriers already doing proof-of-concepts with HP NFV solutions.

"And these are with major players," Gillai continued. "These aren't mom-and-pop service providers."

Chad Williams, vice president of research and engineering at Matrix Integration, a Jasper, Ind.-based HP and Cisco partner, applauded HP's efforts in NFV, and said he sees the technology eventually gaining ground in vertical markets like higher education.

"HP's continued leadership in the Open Networking space shows their commitment and dedication. They are definitely leading the charge in innovation in this space," Williams told CRN in an email. "Our company does a considerable amount of work and collaboration with universities, as well as national, regional and state research-based networks. These universities and research networks operate much like that of a carrier network, so many of the technologies that would be valuable to a carrier are also very valuable to this research space."

HP's partnership with Wind River isn't its first investment in NFV. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based tech giant in February launched a new business unit dedicated to NFV, which is now led by Gillai and considered part of HP's broader cloud organization.

Also in February, HP launched OpenNFV, an open-standards based carrier reference architecture and a new technology partner program to go along with it. HP also has OpenNFV labs, a center for service providers and NFV vendors to test and integrate new technologies.

HP rival Cisco Systems also has been investing in NFV, rolling out in February its Evolved Services Platform (ESP), a virtualization and orchestration software platform for carriers.

Gillai said one of HP's advantages compared to more "traditional" networking suppliers, is that it isn't hung up on protecting its legacy customer base in the carrier market, allowing it, instead, to really double down on disruptive technologies like NFV.

"We feel really good about it," Gillai told CRN. "We have already won some nice deals with NFV, but I think you will see some big things next year in terms of carriers making the choices to use us."

PUBLISHED NOV. 4, 2014