Red Hat Certification for NFV Now Available for Partners

During OpenStack Summit in Tokyo this week, you'll undoubtedly hear much about the open source cloud platform and the telecommunications industry. For communications service providers (CSPs), the ability to virtualize network functions holds significant potential – the ability to transform their businesses and modernize both their infrastructure and offerings, quickly and easily delivering customer-facing services, with increased demand capacity. With OpenStack emerging as a preferred open platform for virtualizing network functions, CSPs continue to demand a robust and trusted ecosystem of solutions, and close collaboration between technology vendors to deliver optimal performance, availability and support.

Red Hat has a proven record in developing commercial ecosystems around an open infrastructure platform, fostering a strong network of technology providers to deliver enterprise features needed for mission-critical deployments. Our focus on certified, supported ecosystems carries beyond Red Hat Enterprise Linux and has helped to pave the way for a Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure partner network to emerge as the industry's largest ecosystem in support of commercial OpenStack deployments.

Building on the solid foundation of our trusted OpenStack ecosystem, we are bringing the same approach to vertical solutions for the communications industry. Red Hat's strategy to address the requirements of CSPs is to make OpenStack carrier-ready through upstream contributions and collaborations with industry leaders, rather than create a separate carrier version of OpenStack. A key area of focus in OpenStack is Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and we are excited that industry leaders such as Alcatel Lucent, NEC and Nokia have chosen Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to power their Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) offerings, and we look forward to expanding the scope of our NFV ecosystem to provide choice to CSPs across all layers of the ETSI NFV architecture.

Expanding our existing certification for OpenStack infrastructure and applications, today Red Hat is announcing validation and certification services for partners with NFV products. This NFV validation offers our mutual customers confidence that the components of their NFV solution:

• Have been tested and validated by Red Hat and partners

• Are fully supported by Red Hat and our partners

• Meet our best practices for deployment and configuration

As the NFV ecosystem grows and matures with more vendors and use cases, it is critical that these key technologies and products are working and supported in a manner the brings confidence to organizations and customers looking to deploy validated products. Red Hat has a long history of building these certified ecosystems, and by expanding our certification offerings we plan to work with a variety of companies across NFV infrastructure services, Management and Orchestration (MANO) and Virtual Network Functions (VNF) in driving technical and validation engagement with Red Hat’s OpenStack product and business initiatives.

Technology Partners who participate in this program will have the support of technical, architectural and adoption resources, as well as access to Red Hat’s certification tools and processes. Successfully validated products can take advantage of marketing and awareness activities as well as a certified product listing service within Red Hat’s customer portal. From a customer support perspective, engaged companies can be part of a collaborative workflow for issue resolution with Red Hat’s Global Support Services.

If you are a provider of NFV infrastructure services, Management and Orchestration (MANO) or Virtual Network Functions (VNF), we invite you to join our technology partner program and align your technology with our platform. If you're interested in learning more, or if you have questions about participating, contact us at connect@redhat.com or visit Red Hat's booth – P7 - at the Tokyo OpenStack Summit, October 27 – 30.