FEATURE: SDN
telecommunications industry has spent time
to fully adopt norms and initiatives like Open
Network Function Virtualisation Framework.
ICT convergence is also happening in both network
and IT technologies. This transformation and
long-term roadmap is being handled in a good
way by some global tier-one operators. Some
service providers have defined their blueprint for
infrastructure virtualisation and transformation.
Network virtualisation is at the core of the
software-defined datacentre approach, which is
the complete reproduction of a physical network
into software. Applications run on a virtual
network exactly the same as if it were a physical
network. Network virtualisation presents logical
networking devices and services—logical ports,
switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, virtual
private networks and more — to connected
workloads. Virtual networks offer the same
features and guarantees of
a physical network with the
operational benefits and
hardware independence of
virtualisation.
Across the Middle East region,
the most pressing business
challenge is confronting the
IT infrastructure sprawl that
forces IT departments to
channel 70% of their budget
into maintenance, rather than
innovation. Because today’s
x86 servers are designed to
run only one operating system
(Left to right) Rasheed Al Omari, Principal Business Solutions Strategist MENA at
and application at a time,
VMware; Manish Vyas, Group President CME, Chief Executive Network Services at
even small datacentres need
Tech Mahindra; Ravi Mali, Regional Director Middle East at Ciena; Indranil Das is
to deploy many servers, which
Head of Digital Services at Ericsson Middle East and Africa.
tend to operate at only 12%
capacity. Virtualisation solves
"On the other hand, a lot of telecom service providers
this inefficiency problem by enabling multiple
are still trying to execute transformation of their
operating systems to run on one physical server.
infrastructure by virtualising legacy functions one-by-
one. This could be a good methodology to adapt the
Key vertical markets for virtualisation in the
technology, but will require further revision and delays region include banking and finance, education,
of total convergence transformation," says Das.
government, healthcare, manufacturing, retail,
and telecommunications. With the Middle East’s
The region's leading telecom service providers
high rate of mobile device penetration and usage,
started to work in this area at almost the same
organisations are looking to leverage the power of
time as global tier-one operators. Ericsson is
virtualisation to deliver new levels of citizen and
running virtualisation components including
customer experience.
hardware, software, virtualisation layer and
applications, for some Middle East customers.
"We are seeing security with micro-segmentation
and secure end user, IT automation and disaster
"We are happy to see now, that almost all regional recovery as the use cases in the Middle East,"
operators are looking for virtualisation functions
points out Rasheed Al Omari, Principal Business
as the main or optional requirement," says Das.
Solutions Strategist MENA at VMware.
Transforming the datacentre
Any datacentre has four building blocks:
applications, compute, storage and network.
Over 70% of all servers are virtualised and
the number continues to increase. Compute,
storage and network support the availability of
applications and while compute and storage have
been virtualised, the network has fundamentally
remained unchanged for decades.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Network virtualisation, combined with Internet of
Things infrastructure such as the VMware Pulse
IoT Centre, enables city governments to improve
the lives of citizens, deliver better emergency
management, enable smart police stations, and
create smart buildings.
Network virtualisation can help smart cities to
function with world-class physical security, while
analysing, preventing, and adapting to
cyber-threats.
www.intelligentcio.com