At VMworld 2019 this week in Barcelona, VMware gave attendees a preview of Project Maestro, a telco cloud orchestrator targeted towards communications service providers (CSPs).
The solution enables CSPs to build and automate network services across more network function formats. According to VMware, this enables greater interoperability and improves operations across NFV and Telco Cloud architecture.
The end game of the new solution is to speed up time-to-market of new services, while mitigating the cost of managing more complex networks and improving customer experiences.
Key features of Maestro
A statement released by the company highlights key features of Project Maestro, with a focus on improved time to revenue, multi-cloud agility, cloud-native networks, orchestration and interoperability.
Features include:
- A vendor-neutral and standard-compliant approach for designing and onboarding VNFs/CNFs or network services
- Lifecycle management automation capabilities
- Real-time decisioning capabilities and holistic Telco Cloud awareness
- Seamless on-boarding and orchestration of VMs and container-based infrastructure
- Native integration into VMware cloud technologies and Virtualized Infrastructure Managers (VIMs)
- Better interoperability with a modular and model-driven approach, as well as an expanding partner network
On the growing demand for solutions such as Maestro, Shekar Ayyar, VMware executive vice president and general manager Telco and Edge Cloud, says, “As the telco industry transitions to 5G and edge computing, CSPs are readying their infrastructure to be able to deliver next generation apps and services to both consumers and enterprises with agility and scalability.”
“A new approach to orchestration is required – one that is cloud-first and abstracts the multi-cloud complexity. This is precisely what we are aiming to address with Project Maestro,” Ayyar says.
Millicom and Self Certification programme
In addition to introducing Project Maestro, VMware also announced that Millicom has selected VMware to build its telco cloud, and the new VMware VNF Self Certification programme.
Millicom is a provider of cable and mobile services in emerging markets in Latin America and Africa, with approximately 50 million customers and a cable footprint of more than 11 million homes.
Millicom is looking to modernise its infrastructure in order to adopt 5G and accelerate the development and release of new services.
According to VMware, the vendor will partner with Millicom to build a telco cloud that is software-defined, automated, virtualised infrastructure built on NFV for core network workloads, and converged with IT workloads through a common, unified architecture.
Finally, VMware’s VNF Self Certification programme extension allows VNF vendors to accelerate their testing and application readiness on the vCloud NFV platform by running an automated certification testing in the cloud, VMware states.
According to the company, this gives CSPs greater speed and flexibility to upgrade their vCloud NFV infrastructure with a validated and certified VNF for that specific release.
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