NFV, virtualized central offices and the Need for VNF Data Protection

This is a guest post from Tom Lahive of Trilio.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is designed to provide value around modularity and flexibility. NFV can allow different radio access networks and customer applications to run on one physical network so that the 5G revolution becomes a reality. Critical enterprise compliance requirements, including data protection and disaster recovery, must still be met during this race to modernization.

Why VNF Data Protection Matters

Many telecommunications companies are porting over their legacy applications to new NFV infrastructure. If these workloads contain any sort of network data, they must be backed up. Otherwise, they risk losing operational data (device configurations, service parameters, policies) and collected data (logs, analytics, usage records).

Legacy applications or VMs stored within unprotected VNFs are subject to a wide variety of risks, both inside and outside the VNF. Administrators might unknowingly alter configurations or networking definitions, delete files, and even delete VMs. Software updates and errors may cause data corruption. Automation scripts may overwrite VMs or data. The list goes on.

When it comes down to it, NFV deployments need data protection for the same fundamental reasons as any other enterprise environment: to enable users to restore workloads quickly in case of data damage, data loss, or an area-wide disaster.

Plus, NFV is complex by nature. Your team has likely spent considerable time and energy building and tuning a Virtualized Network Function (VNF) correctly. In the event of disaster, it is considerably faster to recover these VNFs from a well-known point-in-time backup than re-deploying stateless VNFs from scratch.

Any number of errors and mistakes can significantly jeopardize the integrity of your VNFs and require emergency roll back or disaster recovery measures. We’ve built a data protection solution for OpenStack NFV that can mitigate these risks and position your business for success.

Red Hat virtual central office solution is a new offering that provides a number of certified partner workloads to simplify NFV adoption. Trilio is proud to work with Red Hat on its new Red Hat virtual central office solution. TrilioVault seeks to address critical requirements for NFV data protection, especially those built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat virtual central office solution by:

• Capturing point-in-time snapshots of VNFs, so users can restore complete environments including VM flavors and network topology/configurations.
• Supporting deployment via Red Hat Director and Red Hat Ansible playbooks, so administrators can deploy the two solutions together using a single tool.
• Leveraging incremental forever snapshots that include changed block tracking in order to minimize storage consumption.
• Certifying Red Hat Ceph storage.
• Covering both backup/recovery and disaster recovery scenarios.

Protecting your OpenStack NFV environment can help you to recover from data damage or disaster significantly faster than by re-deploying an entire VNF from scratch.

Learn more about NFV and how to modernize, migrate, and innovate with Red Hat’s virtual central office solution.