The SCOPE Alliance, an association of leading Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), announced the availability of its Virtualization Package containing three technical white papers that discuss different aspects of virtualization. Virtualization is an emerging technology that provides benefits in areas such as porting legacy software on new platform technology, optimizing hardware resource usage and using multi-core processors. The Virtualization Package gives ecosystem providers a set of hardware and software virtualization requirements that describe functional and non-functional aspects of virtualization features required by the NEPs in support of their carrier-grade telecommunications solutions.

“As a consortium of NEPs, it is important for SCOPE to address the lack of standardization in the area of virtualization,” said Ron Breault, SCOPE Technical Co-Chair. “We anticipate that the requirements identified by these documents will assist ecosystem providers with delivery of carrier-grade virtualization features and solutions. The documents build upon each other and form one of the most comprehensive summaries of NEPs’ virtualization requirements to date.”

The papers address the State-of-the-Art, Use Cases and Requirements of virtualization. In creating these documents, SCOPE’s Virtualization Working Group focused on the core networking area, with emphasis on the control and data planes.

The State-of-the-Art paper focuses on system virtualization. It aims to classify the various virtualization approaches, along with their goals, advantages and drawbacks. This classification is expected to help identify virtualization technologies that might be applied within the network/telecommunications equipment space. The paper also provides a glossary of terms and definitions related to virtualization.

The Use Cases paper discusses virtualization deployment and consolidation of telecommunications applications in various hardware configurations. The use cases collectively describe the areas where virtualization might be of value to the NEPs.

The Requirements paper delineates a set of hardware and software virtualization requirements that describe functional and non-functional aspects of virtualization features required by the NEPs. They were generated based on a set of business and technical use cases provided by the NEPs and are intended to be used by the ecosystem providers for delivery of carrier grade virtualization features and solutions for use by the NEPs. An ecosystem provider may choose to address all or part of the virtualization requirements, depending on the elements of the ecosystem that it aims to provide and the use cases it aims to address.

The virtualization documents are free to download at www.SCOPE-Alliance.org.