Huawei and Red Hat, on Friday announced a new global partnership to enable OpenStack-based cloud deployments. By expanding their relationship, Huawei and Red Hat aim to accelerate collaboration around OpenStack for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) required by Communication Service Providers (CSPs).
 
“Huawei offers its customers a true carrier-grade OpenStack solution, and we are honored to expand our existing partnership with Red Hat to include collaboration on OpenStack for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Through open collaboration with partners like Red Hat, Huawei aims to support the business reform and transformation of the telecom industry. This partnership will focus on NFV and the development of joint solutions to foster an open, interconnected, and innovative ecosystem that supports the entire OpenStack community,” said Ren Zhipeng, President of Huawei's Cloud Computing Product Line.
 
“Carriers and telecommunications service providers are under pressure to modernize their network infrastructure to meet demands created by new service offerings and the explosive volume of data crossing the network. As a result, many are exploring the benefits OpenStack-based clouds can bring to NFV projects. By combining Huawei’s leadership in the telecommunications industry with Red Hat’s leadership in OpenStack and, more broadly, enterprise open source, we are well positioned to deliver cloud solutions that enable carriers to meet their network modernization challenges,” said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president, Infrastructure Business, Red Hat.
 
According to the 2014 SDN and NFV Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey, conducted by Infonetics Research, 93 percent of telecommunications operators interviewed plan to deploy NFV as carriers work to modernize the way telecommunications networks are built and operated. As OpenStack establishes itself as the platform of choice for NFV workloads, Huawei and Red Hat are engaging in a global partnership to cooperatively engineer carrier-grade cloud solutions for CSPs.
 
As part of this initiative, Huawei and Red Hat aim to combine Huawei's world class domain expertise and extensive global experience with telecommunications companies and Red Hat's leading OpenStack and open source expertise to help CSPs embrace cloud computing with a carrier-grade OpenStack solution. Huawei and Red Hat plan to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Huawei’s FusionSphere Cloud OS at the management layer to offer a unified open, flexible, and production-ready cloud solution to support telecommunication carriers' NFV evolution. Working together, Huawei and Red Hat plan to align upstream contributions, engineering, product, and go-to-market efforts to drive the adoption of OpenStack for NFV implementations by CSPs.
 
Huawei and Red Hat will work together to contribute NFV enabling features to the upstream OpenStack community, which are required by CSP cloud deployments, and serve as the foundation of highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions. By contributing results from their collaboration to the upstream community, Red Hat and Huawei are enabling the broader OpenStack community to benefit from their collaboration, unlike approaches that favor proprietary add-ons and further vendor lock-in.
 
Huawei and Red Hat also plan to work together to certify the joint solutions, giving CSPs confidence that the solutions will provide consistent performance and capability.