Red Hat and Orange have teamed up as part of a joint engineering programme with the aim of bringing in new technology innovation in network virtualisation.

The motive of the joint engineering programme is deliver additional features supporting network functions virtualisation (NFV) into OpenStack and other open source communities and also to meet the explicit requirements of communications service providers and their networks when formulating technologies.

The recent integration of the OpenStack BGP VPN project and its reference implementation (BaGPipe) was a result of this community collaboration. In the integration, Orange played the role of lead contributor.

The aim of the BGP VPN project is to allow telecom operators mutually interconnect Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or NFV data centres and businesses via the use of industry-standard routing technologies.

Orange said that as part of its network transformation initiative, it is adopting NFV. In order to achieve this, Orange is using Red Hat OpenStack Platform for its multinational NFV deployment of massively-scalable and agile cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Darrell Jordan-Smith, VP of global information and communications technology at Red Hat, said: “Orange is embracing a role as a modern open communications provider, not only by deploying a fully open technology platform with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage but also by adding its expertise to community development efforts. We’re very pleased that our technologies power Orange’s standardized NFVi platform and we’re excited to continue our collaboration in open source initiatives, aimed at delivering new business value to the industry.”