Beginners Guide: Software Defined Network, Telco Cloud & NFV

Software Defined Networking (SDN) concept has been becoming a buzz word in the networking industry.

Traditional IP networks are complex and very hard to manage. It is both difficult to configure the network according to pre-defined policies, and to reconfigure it to respond to faults, load and changes. To make matters even more difficult, current networks are also vertically integrated: the control and data planes are bundled together. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm that promises to change this state of affairs, by breaking vertical integration, separating the network’s control logic from the underlying routers and switches, promoting (logical) centralization of network control, and introducing the ability to program the network.

Software defined networking (SDN) is a new way of looking at how networking and loud solutions should be automated, efficient, and scalable in a new world where application services may be provided locally, by the data center, or even the cloud. This is impossible with a rigid system that’s difficult to manage, maintain, and upgrade. Going forward, you need flexibility, simplicity, and the ability to quickly grow to meet changing IT and business needs.

Virtualization refers to the creation of virtual machine that can virtualize all the hardware resources, including processors, memory, storage, and network connectivity. Physical hardware resources can be shared by one or more virtual machines.

The course covers terminologies that need to be understood related to virtualization concepts. These terminologies are:

• Server
• Hypervisor
• Guest OS
• Application
• N I C
• Virtual Machine (or VM)

The course also covers NFV architecture. Briefly,

VNF (or Virtual Network Function): is the basic block in NFV Architecture. It is the virtualized network element. For example when a router is virtualized, we call it Router VNF; another example is base station VNF.

EMS (or Element Management System): is the element management system for VNF. This is responsible for the management of VNF operation, in the same way as physical network elements are managed by their respective EMS of VNFs.

Apart from all these, participants will learn about Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure, Virtualization Layers, NFV Orchestrator and open stack software used for implementation of the virtualization concepts.