Wind River delivers real-time virtualization software

Wind River has developed Wind River Open Virtualization Profile to deliver high performance, open-source, real-time kernel virtualization technologies for next generation telecommunications equipment as well as network functions virtualization (NFV) and cloud advancements.

The telecommunications industry is facing challenges from the exponential increase in data traffic generated by the flood of devices connecting to an increasingly strained network. Simultaneously, operators are pushing to rapidly introduce advanced services to generate new revenue streams and drive higher average revenue per user and device. Operators are also looking to reduce the cost of scaling and operating the network by gaining greater efficiencies in hardware utilization and energy consumption and are thus investigating trends such as software defined networking (SDN) and NFV.

Open Virtualization Profile is a high value add-on software profile for Wind River Linux developed by optimizing open source Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology. Customers get the benefit of a real-time deterministic KVM solution, with virtual machine management, and support from the leading commercial embedded Linux provider. Customers can adopt a scalable end-to-end commercially supported virtualization approach that combines the highest levels of performance, cost effectiveness and software intelligence portability across the network.

Open Virtualization Profile allows the deployment of network services on virtual machines without the performance loss associated with using traditional, propriety IT-like virtualization products. This unique real-time approach enables customers to build products that can flexibly run intelligent services anywhere on the network, from access right to the core, driving up network efficiency and substantially lowering operational network costs. Open Virtualization Profile meets the challenging demands of communications networks, but is applicable across other industries as well.
Key features include the following:

• Real-time high performance; extremely low latency measuring as low as under 3 microseconds
• Flexible provisioning of virtual machines
• Live migration of virtual machines
• CPU isolation
• Open source-based; compatible with frameworks such as the Yocto Project™, oVirt and others
• Broad support for a variety of guest operating systems
• Optimization for Intel® architecture; integrated with Intel Data Plane Development Kit (Intel DPDK) and supports Intel DPDK Accelerated Open vSwitch

Virtualization is a natural step for customers towards the path to NFV and according to a recent Light Reading survey, 83% of respondents are embarking on this direction but are highly concerned with keeping the reliability of commercially supported carrier grade options versus what is available now in the IT world.1

“As networks are pushed to their limits, virtualization is becoming an increasingly important approach. Operators are looking toward NFV to support the transition to scalable platforms that enable flexible deployment of network services,” said Jim Douglas, senior vice president of marketing at Wind River. “With Wind River Open Virtualization Profile, we are delivering a real-time virtualization solution to support the rigorous SLAs of a carrier network and enable them to gain the flexibility, scalability, and cost and energy benefits cloud data centers already enjoy.”

“By moving from a distributed hardware environment to a flexible and virtualized environment or cloud, operators can rapidly deploy new applications and services where and when they are needed instead of updating individual central office locations or hardware,” continued Douglas.

“KVM can deliver flexible options for not only the enterprise but well beyond to cloud service providers and the broader telecommunications industry.” said Ram Peddibhotla, Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) Board Member and Director of System Software Planning and Marketing at Intel. “Embedded solutions are one of the key KVM use cases identified by the OVA and we welcome innovative solutions such as the Wind River Open Virtualization Profile that broaden the adoption of KVM.”