Video Delivery in the Virtual World
Strategically, reducing the cost of delivering video in any way has the potnetial to save millions of dollars for service providers
“Service providers have to drive down both the capital and operating costs with video delivery—without sacrificing quality, reliability or scale,” said Robert Courteau, Executive V.P.,
Communications BU, Kontron. “The reference architecture Kontron and GENBAND are demonstrating live at the Mobile World Congress fulfill these service provider requirements with unmatched
functional excellence.”
“GENBAND is pleased to work with Kontron to offer service providers unique and market-leading NFV media processing capabilities,” added Sanjay Bhatia, Director of Marketing Strategy at GENBAND.
Hire the right conductor
If each VNF represents sections in an orchestra, an NFV Orchestrator acts like the conductor, gluing it all together and ensuring the sections perform the score. Oracle, HP, NetCracker, Overture, Amdocs, and Cisco all offer excellent options, but be sure that service creation, provisioning, and assurance are all capabilites of the orchestrator as you research potential options. Also, while all orchestrators on the market proclaim to be vendor-agnostic with regard to VNFs, take a close look at how this is achieved. In some instances, desirable VNFs from a particular vendor may work natively with the orchestrator. In other cases, they may not. Nakina Systems offers a solution for the muti-vendor VNF and multi-vendor orchestrator dilemma called NI-FRAMEWORK. This sits in-between the VNF catalog and the OSS/BSS and various orchestrators.Virtual video assurance
Activating video-capable devices and delivering streams with NFV is fine and dandy; but, if there is no visibility into the performance of video in the virtualized world, QoE could fall off and
impact the customer experience without the service provider knowing. As you might expect, vendors who have a legacy in network performance testing are re-tooling to provide solutions to this
problem.
JDSU is marketing TrueSpeed VNF, a testing and assurance solution for CSPs. With TrueSpeed VNF, operators can leverage their installed base of COTS server resources to quickly
evaluate the customer experience of their network and provide actionable information to resolve any problems.
NetScout argues that service assurance is more important than ever as we migrate to the virtual world. It's n GeniusONE Performance Management platform enables service providers to have
an end-to-end view of the performances of network, application, and device performance.
To save money tomorrow, re-think video today
Video is rapidly becoming the most dominant application in mobile networks. An Ericsson Mobility Report found video to be the largest and fastest growing segment of mobile data traffic, with
mobile video expected to increase by more than 10x by 2019. All of the same issues that service providers face in the physical world are present in the virtual world and require purpose-built
solutions. The point is that NFV, while promising, doesn't automatically solve service creation, provisioning, activation, delivery or assurance for video. It requires the right VNFs,
designed specifically for video use cases, and the right NFV Orchestrator. Given the skyrocketing costs of delivering video and the impending capacity crunch that 4K Ultra HD video will
bring, the time is now to begin the transition to NFV for video.
