WWT Receives Top Intel Network Builders Status at SDN NFV World Congress

World Wide Technology on Oct. 14 at SDN NFV World Congress in The Netherlands received Intel Network Builders Winners' Circle Leaders Board status, the top tiering for the program that recognizes industry leaders working closely with Intel to develop the next generation of network solutions.

It's the second year in a row WWT has achieved Leaders Board status, which is open to all Intel Network Builders partners building commercially available solutions.

WWT is working with Intel's ecosystem of partners to build next-generation solutions that help WWT customers accelerate time to market and develop new revenue streams. Those solutions include Red Hat Virtual Central Office (VCO), Next-Generation Central Office (NGCO), solutions built on Intel Select Solutions for uCPE and NFVI Forwarding Platform.

Communication service providers face intense pressure to quickly deliver and monetize 5G services to maximize the ROI of technology investments. But proprietary, purpose-built legacy hardware is ill suited for such innovation due to long purchasing cycles, overprovisioned environments and high costs.

Service providers need a more flexible, agile infrastructure at the edge of the network that will speed deployment, simplify operations, streamline costs and scale as needed in the future. WWT solutions validated in its Advanced Technology Center, a state-of-the-art testing and research facility with more than $500 million in OEM technology investment, can then be deploy at scale through its global integration centers.

Red Hat Virtual Central Office

WWT's Red Hat Virtual Central Office (VCO) solution provides a blueprint for modernizing service provider operations at the network edge via an open, software-defined infrastructure platform.

WWT collaborated with Red Hat to build the Red Hat Virtual Central Office (VCO) solution, which enables service providers to quickly and seamlessly deploy new capabilities for low latency and high-bandwidth application services. Built on high-performing Intel architecture, service providers can readily insert Red Hat's portfolio of open standards-based products as well as technologies from the ecosystem of certified partners into this pluggable framework.

WWT VCO solutions use the Red Hat suite of software running on powerful Intel-based hardware from world-leading partners, including HPE, Altiostar, Affirmed Networks and F5.

WWT in February 2019 at Mobile World Congress Barcelona announced its intent to collaborate with Red Hat's extensive partner ecosystem to validate and customize the solution.

As interest grows around edge-based services, VCO will experience increasing demand for software-based services and operational simplicity. Red Hat's advanced capabilities are foundational in WWT's ability to deliver full-stack network function virtualization (NFV) solutions four times faster than traditional validation.

Next-Generation Central Office

The WWT Next Generation Central Office solution is built on an Intel/QCT/Red Hat reference architecture to deliver zero-touch provisioning of secure SD-WAN services (to enterprise branch locations) from the network edge.

The solution is based on a model for offering managed or un-managed services using enterprise vCPE paradigms (thick or thin) and includes QCT's NFV infrastructure design for scalability and efficiency, Red Hat's OpenStack Platform 13, a disaggregated network fabric powered by Cumulus Network's Linux network operating system, Cloudify's open source orchestration platform and Fortinet's Fortigate Secure SD-WAN.

Universal CPE

WWT offers Intel Select Solutions for uCPE to help service providers bring services to market faster.

WWT's Intel Select Solutions for uCPE is based on the functional requirements of a wide range of uCPE use cases for verified and workload-optimized configurations for virtualized network functions (VNFs) and other applications.

Both open-source and commercial software solutions can be hosted on the uCPEs running on open operating systems (Ubuntu, CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Zero-touch provisioning at power-on can connect the uCPE to the internet using a secure and automated process over a choice of WAN connections. Encryption can be performed by software or accelerated by hardware based on Intel QuickAssist Technology for secure communications.

Intel Select Solutions are verified hardware and software stacks that are optimized for specific software workloads across compute, storage and network. The solutions are developed from deep Intel experience, along with hardware and software vendors, in addition to extensive collaboration with world-leading data center solution providers like WWT.

WWT is helping customers address specific challenges when transitioning to uCPE-based network virtualization in the ATC, evaluating:

• Performance and functionality. Benchmark VNFs to detect and remove bottlenecks that may appear at different levels of the virtual stack.
• Scalability and network architecture. Validate scale-out and service chaining of VNFs, and prepare for intensive workloads.
• Reliability and security. Test VNFs on carrier-grade platforms to assess overall system availability and expose them to real-world threats.