With the arrival of new Networking paradigms, such as NFV and SDN, Planex felt the need to adopt these technologies and show their cost and flexibility benefits. For this purpose, a group was created to research and develop virtualization solutions focused mainly on NFV and SDN, although they do not necessarily have to be related.
Currently, focus is on implementing Proofs of Concept (POC), through which it is possible to display with little physical resources, in a simple, agnostic way, a real case scenario based on SDN controllers ( Openflow enabled) and VNFs, which may be based upon microservices or VNFCs.
As regards SDN, being that it is one of the new paradigms which uses Networking technology, this architecture establishes separation of data plane (packet forwarding) from control plane (control software). This control migration,, formerly hardware-related, to a decentralized controller enables network infrastructure, abstraction, from an application point of view. This separation allows for a more flexible, programmable, agnostic and visibly cheaper network infrastructure. Besides network abstraction, SDN architecture provides a set of APIs that simplify implementation of certain network services (for example: routing, multicast, security, access control, bandwidth management, QoS, etc.) Therefore, network intelligence is centralized in contollers, which are exclusively software-based. Network devices (switches, routers, FW,etc.) basically only deliver packages, which can be managed by an open interface, such as OpenFlow, though this is not the only option.
Applications, or microservice-based VNFs, or VNFCs have clear advantages over first generation non-modular VNFs. On the one hand, they enable microservice reuse for several VNFs, so there is no need to purchase the same service from different providers, and therefore,enable cost reduction. On the other hand, a more efficient use of available processing resources is achieved, Clearly there is a far greater chance of availability of 2x Cores in a certain host to process a microservice, than availability of 8x Cores for one non-disunited VNF
Summing up, our goal is to focus on network virtualization and management, and to reach greater levels of programmability, flexibility and modularity, impossible for first generation virtualized networks.