Reconfigurable Computing Breathes New Life into NFV

Though Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) have been around for a while now, many organizations are still weighing the benefits and drawbacks of adopting these technologies. SDN and NFV hold great promise because they separate software from hardware, which eliminates standard proprietary bundling and its hefty price tag. However, they also have challenges that organizations need to overcome before enjoying the full value that is possible.In the early days of network infrastructure, the standard practice was to buy customized hardware and software. Example applications include network gateways, switches, routers, network load balancers, varied mobile applications in the mobile core; radio access network such as vEPC (virtual evolved packet core), vCPE (virtual customer premise equipment) and vRAN (virtual Radio Access Network); and security applications like firewalls, NGFW, IDS/IPS, SSL/IPsec offload appliances, DLP and antivirus applications.This requires buying proprietary appliances to run each networking application. Operators would rather support these functions as software applications (virtualized network functions, or VNFs), running on virtual machines or in containers on standard servers.