Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is becoming mainstream for operators who now have multiple millions of subscribers running on these networks. One example is Turkcell, an operator that chose Affirmed Networks to help them transition their network to a virtualized architecture. Turkcell had solutions running on several hardware architectures and wanted to align these services onto a common NFVi platform. The company chose Affirmed networks as the system integrator for the entire network transformation project.
Watch the video discussion about how Affirmed is working to transform Turkcell’s Network. The session, hosted by Light Reading’s Ray Le Maistre, features Aykut Soner Demirkol from Turkcell and Angela Whiteford for Affirmed.
Aykut points out that it is crucial to start the journey to NFVi as soon as possible. An investment in a common hardware platform enables a variety of important benefits, such as making switching from one software vendor to another quicker and less expensive.
When moving to a virtualized architecture, operators want to bring multiple best-of-breed vendors together to achieve maximum performance and resiliency. For Turkcell, Affirmed provides the system integration knowledge needed to manage various layers of integration with multiple vendors. Another factor is the organizational changes associated with network virtualization. Operators don’t want to wait—and shouldn’t have to wait—“until the organization is ready,” so Turkcell can take advantage of integration and managed services from Affirmed to follow a build-operate-transfer model that brings them up the maturity curve quickly while getting internal teams up to speed on the technology. Affirmed’s deep expertise pays dividends in many ways. For instance, determining the optimal architecture for telco applications is very different from enterprise or web applications, where the platform underneath can be the same. A packet core and a web service can’t really run on the same common infrastructure.
Turkcell’s unified NFVi Platform is now in the deployment stage. Angela Whiteford of Affirmed Networks says that, with over sixty existing deployments around the world, Affirmed finds many operators are looking at how to create new services quickly. Automation, analytics, and slicing are three core concepts, with analytics providing an understanding of how new services are functioning.