Road to Network Cloudification: Telco Cloud & NFV Reference Architecture for Telco Cloud — Red Hat, VMWare, Mirantis, UNICA & ECOMP

3 min readApr 30, 2021

This post is continuation of the “Road to Network Cloudification” series where we have been looking at the virtualization journey so far, status & 5G related news of some of the major Operators in the region being discussed.

I came across documents of NFV Reference Architectures and it only made sense to share them as well in this series so that anyone interested in understanding the journey can get a feel & flavor of what the operators are deploying in their attempts to virtualize / cloudify their network.

Before we look at Reference architecture lets quickly look at what Telco Cloud is:

TELCO CLOUD:

Telco Cloud is basically a Cloud Computing Infrastructure (on Premise or Private or Public or hybrid) which is being used as foundation for Telecom data centers as well as to support Telecom network use cases and telecom technologies.

I also came across some good explanation of Telco Cloud online and sharing them here:

1. https://www.vmware.com/topics/glossary/content/telco-cloud

2. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/service-provider/telco-cloud.html#~what-is-telco-cloud

3. https://www.juniper.net/uk/en/solutions/nfv/telco-cloud/

NFV REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR TELCO CLOUD:

Majority of the solutions used to deploy NFV Telco Cloud globally have been covered here: Red Hat, VMware vCloud, Mirantis Cloud Platform, UNICA & ECOMP.

These reference architecture can help put a picture around the developments taking place that are highlighted in the other articles.

RED HAT:

Red Hat NFV product mapping against the ETSI NFV architecture is seen below. More details related to Networking, Storage, High Availability, Performance & Optimization, Mobile Applications,Security, etc can be reviewed in the document: Red Hat reference architecture

VMware vCloud NFV:

VMware vCloud NFV product mapping against the ETSI NFV architecture is seen below. More details related to the components & their inter-working, Multi tenancy, High Availability, Mobile Applications, Deployment options etc can be reviewed in the document: vCloud NFV reference architecture

Mirantis Cloud Platform:

Mirantis Cloud Platform(MCP) solution view against the ETSI NFV architecture is seen below. The data sheet for MCP Cloud can be reviewed in the document: MCP Datasheet. Further details of Mirantis offering for NFV can be checked out at : https://www.mirantis.com/solutions/network-functions-virtualization-nfv/ .

UNICA:

UNICA is Telefonica’ s Network Virtualization/ Telco cloud program based on ETSI NFV and included SDN & infrastructure management components. The Infrastructure architecture is seen below. More details on the program are available in the whitepaper released for UNICA

ECOMP:

Lastly, ECOMP i.e. Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management & Policy is platform part of AT&T’s Domain 2.0 initiative. ECOMP’ s Platform decomposition & mapping against ETSI NFV is seen below. More details on the program are available in the whitepaper released for ECOMP.