MAKING THE DREAM OF NETWORK FUNCTIONS VIRTUALIZATION (NFV) A REALITY

After years of being bound to proprietary, expensive hardware/software bundles, organizations were excited by the prospect of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV). Each of these approaches offers a new freedom and flexibility, but they’ve languished as promise and reality have met in the data center. The industry-disrupting potential of NFV and SDN is tempered by challenges that still must be overcome. Enterprises, mobile operators and data centers have historically built their network infrastructure mainly on custom-designed physical hardware and software. Examples include network gateways; switches; routers; network load balancers; mobile applications in the mobile core and radio access network, such as vEPC (virtual evolved packet core), vCPE (virtual customer-premises equipment), vRAN (virtual radio access network); and security applications such as firewalls, NGFW, IDS/IPS, SSL/IPSec offload appliances, DLP, and antivirus applications—to name just a few.