• Telefónica completes its testing of the Wind River Titanium Cloud
• Will use it as a Virtualized Infrastructure Manager for NFV workloads
• Part of its multi-VIM approach for the telco’s UNICA initiative
• Compatible with ETSI’s Open Source MANO orchestration

Wind River has announced that Telefónica has completed the validation in its NFV Reference Lab of Wind River’s Titanium Cloud as a Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) for NFV workloads, as part of the telco’s UNICA network virtualization project. It reportedly conducted a multi-phase evaluation that included functional testing of the Titanium Cloud virtualization platform, as well as it integration with ETSI-based OSM orchestration. Additionally, Telefónica is running use case trials, including testing virtual RAN solutions hosted on Titanium Cloud.

Telefόnica’s UNICA programme was designed to provide a reference architecture for network virtualisation based on ETSI’s NFV work. Specifically, a common infrastructure (i.e. NFVi) to host any VNF; management and orchestration (MANO) of the NFVi, associated VNFs and network services; plus various interfaces and integration with external and legacy systems. UNICA also specifies the SDN components needed to support a telco cloud implementation, plus the system-wide management of the entire infrastructure, all wrapped up in an open source friendly approach.

The VIM manages the virtualisation environment and the connectivity between the various, whether they be virtual machines (VMs) or containers. It is one of four identified key components of UNICA – the others being the NFVi, governance and management, and the various tools and resources for support functions and other services.

 “After careful and comprehensive evaluation, Wind River Titanium Cloud stood out for its unique differentiators, such as extreme low latency and high reliability, to effectively meet the technical challenges that accompany telco cloud compute,” said Javier Gavilan, Core Network, Platforms & Transport Director at Telefónica.

Original Press Release:

Telefónica Selects Wind River Titanium Cloud Virtualization Platform for UNICA Initiative

ALAMEDA, CA – Jan. 14, 2019 – Wind River®, a leader in delivering IoT software to critical infrastructure, announced today that Telefónica has completed their validation in their NFV Reference Lab of Wind River Titanium Cloud as a Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) for NFV workloads, in line with the multi VIM paradigm of their UNICA initiative. Titanium Cloud is an ultrareliable, deployment-ready virtualization software platform, fully compatible with open standards such the Open Source MANO (OSM) orchestration project.

In recent months, the Telefónica UNICA network virtualization project has further concentrated efforts to advance edge cloud compute use cases such as virtual RAN (vRAN), Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and 5G applications.

“By working with network innovators such as Telefónica, Wind River can help the industry address evolving market needs and deploy highly-reliable cloud compute at the optimum edge locations for a wide range of new applications,” said Michael Krutz, Chief Product Officer at Wind River. “Wind River Titanium Cloud delivers a flexible and secure cloud-based infrastructure that can be efficiently deployed at any network location from the edge to the core.”

“5G applications will increasingly demand low latency, and computing will often need to happen much closer to the end device. It was important to select an infrastructure platform that was optimized for edge use cases,” said Javier Gavilan, Core Network, Platforms & Transport Director at Telefónica. “After careful and comprehensive evaluation, Wind River Titanium Cloud stood out for its unique differentiators, such as extreme low latency and high reliability, to effectively meet the technical challenges that accompany Telco cloud compute.”

Telefónica’s communications services and operations span Europe and Latin America, and its UNICA initiatives have begun to deploy in numerous countries in those regions. The UNICA project was initiated in 2015 with the purpose of shifting the way telecommunications networks are designed and installed using virtualization technologies, and extracting the maximum benefits from network functions virtualization (NFV), software defined networking (SDN) and cloud technologies.

Working closely with Wind River, Telefónica conducted a multi-phase evaluation that included comprehensive functional testing of the Titanium Cloud virtualization platform. Test teams also validated the integration of Titanium Cloud with OSM orchestration to prove interoperability. Additionally, Telefónica is running use case trials, including testing virtual RAN solutions hosted on Titanium Cloud.

The Titanium Cloud portfolio comprises a fully integrated, reliable, and deployment-ready virtualization platform that enables service providers to deploy virtualized services faster, at lower cost, and with high uptime. Titanium Cloud provides an ideal software infrastructure for the rigorous demands of critical infrastructure applications such as telecommunications networks and industrial control. Through the Titanium Cloud ecosystem, Wind River collaborates with industry-leading suppliers of hardware and software products to validate the proper and optimal operation of multi-vendor solutions that address important end-to-end use cases like vRAN and MEC.