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Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a
platform built on Red Hat
OpenStack Platform and Red
Hat Ceph Storage
Dana Cooperson
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Turkcell Unified NFVI project overview
2
1 Per March 2019 investor presentation, using an exchange rate of 4.76TRY/USD.
FOCUS OF THIS EFFORT PROJECT APPROACHSTATE OF THE BUSINESS1
STRATEGY ANALYSISBUSINESS DRIVERS
48.9
million
4.5
billion20.8% NFVI GiLAN Turkey Focus Learn
Turkcell Group
subscribers
Revenue in
2018 (USD)
Year-on-year
revenue growth
(2018)
With virtual
infrastructure
manager (VIM)
Services
initially
With
expansions to
other opcos
On platform
and GiLAN
VNFs
From partners,
build expertise
To core
services and
other opcos
▪ Remake itself as a digital service provider
while expanding globally from its five-country
footprint.
▪ Support the growth of its digital subscribers
and 180 million digital services downloads
globally.
▪ Maximise network capex efficiency and
resource scaling and reduce vendor lock-in.
▪ Deploy the Unified NFVI platform as the
base of its telco cloud to support a wide
range of network services.
▪ Make use of open-source software
wherever possible.
▪ Enable trusted vendors to lead the digital
services platform transformation and
transfer expertise to Turkcell personnel.
▪ Turkcell mitigated its risk by anchoring the
effort with a trusted long-standing vendor
within its IT team, Red Hat, starting with
GiLAN services and covering all major core
network services and using professional
services from Red Hat, Affirmed Networks
and Odine Solutions.
▪ Turkcell is now in a strong position to
expand its operations role and the number
of supported services.
BENEFITS
Time to market reduced by 3 months through the
use of virtual rather than physical functions
More flexibility to try new vendors and swap
functions in and out
Core network capex savings and opex containment
Source: Analysys Mason
Expand
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Turkcell had embarked on the path to becoming a digital
service provider and needed telco cloud infrastructure that
would allow it to flexibly and rapidly scale services in
accordance with its ambitions.
Turkish operators are affected by economic difficulties such as
inflation and currency weakness. Turkcell has a dominant share of
mobile subscribers in Turkey, and as of 4Q 2018, has the highest
mobile ARPU.1 Its main communications services revenue is not
keeping up with inflation, and yet the traffic in its main market in
Turkey has doubled over the past 2 years.
Turkcell is remaking itself as a ‘digital operator’ and plans to grow
its revenue through the provision of digital services such as BiP
(an IP-based instant messaging and marketplace service) and
Lifebox (personal cloud storage). It seeks to offer these services
through new digital channels while cutting costs. It is also
preparing to make 5G investments.
About 2 years ago, it began to move away from its legacy network
platform investment approach, which was burdened by high costs
and long change timeframes, towards a more agile, scalable, cost-
efficient platform based on open-source software that could also
support its move to 5G. It spent a year exploring alternatives and
building expertise before picking Red Hat OpenStack Platform and
Red Hat Ceph Storage as the cornerstones of its telco cloud,
backed by Red Hat Consulting services and systems integration
and management services from Affirmed and Odine Solutions.
Figure 1: Business factors that are driving Turkcell’s telco cloud
transformation project
3
Business challenges and key drivers of the project
1 For more information, see Analysys Mason’s Turkey telecoms market report 2019.
EFFICIENCY
50%
NEW
SERVICES
25%AGILITY
25%
Unify communications
services on a common
cloud infrastructure
Reduce network-
related capex
Avoid increasing the
number of operations
staff as traffic grows
Test virtual functions in
weeks compared to
months for physical
ones
Easily replace VNFs
as needed for better
price/performance
Equip staff to take
over day-to-day telco
cloud operations
Start by virtualising
market differentiation/
monetisation functions
Test and deploy vEPC
to support eMBB and
IoT over time
Launch SD-WAN and
other new
communications
services over time
Source: Analysys Mason
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Turkcell’s pragmatic, stepwise approach to building its telco
cloud platform has created a strong foundation for expansion.
Turkcell has been both tactical and strategic in its approach to
telco cloud, seeking quick utility and long-term extensibility. It
started by virtualising GiLAN-related communications functions so
as to reap the benefits to its business as quickly as possible, but
future 5G deployment plans were always a key strategic driver.
Turkcell decided to build its expertise with virtualisation and
cloudification now, so that it could simply expand rather than
replace its telco cloud platform when needed to support 5G-
related edge computing and mobile core and RAN cloudification.
Turkcell’s choice and use of support vendors demonstrates its
pragmatism: Red Hat, Affirmed and Odine Solutions offered a
cost-effective mix of trusted expertise, local support, non-
proprietary approaches and a willingness to build, operate and
transfer the platform to Turkcell’s control according to its needs.
The platform itself is straightforward and uses many standard
open-source components. What sets Turkcell apart is its
determination, vision, methodical approach and focus. It resolved
that a platform was needed, then assembled the team to build it,
onboard VNFs and operationalise it. The project investigation
phase took 1 year, followed by a year of parallel implementation
and roll-outs for the first VNFs. It reported having virtualised 18%
of its “overall data and voice services capacity” by the end of
2018. It expects to reach 40% by the end of 2019.
Figure 2: Turkcell’s stepwise telco cloud approach
4
Analysis: Turkcell is swiftly building expertise and expanding the use of its Unified
NFVI
Investigate platform and VNFs
(RFIs)
• Understand the technology
• Explore vendors’ solutions in
each selection category
Choose platform and first VNFs
(RFPs)
• Pick best of breed suppliers by
category and SI partners
• Test and tune platform
performance
Test/deploy VNFs
• Use captive lab to test VNFs
• Install VNF in production and do
first network implementation
• Migrate capacity according to plan
Extend service virtualisation and
automation
• Determine the best approach for
each use case
• Create a virtualisation roadmap for
all network services
Source: Analysys Mason
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Key benefits
5
2
Turkcell feels better equipped to
consider working with start-ups or non-
incumbent vendors than before it
implemented its Unified NFVI platform.
In addition, it has lowered its costs for
switching should it decide to replace
one vendor’s virtual function with
another’s. Maintaining platform and
application independence will keep
flexibility high.
31
Turkcell has met its telco cloud project
capex goals by realising significant
savings in its first operational year.
Its goal with opex is to arrest the scaling
of operations costs with traffic growth.
It does not wish to eliminate any
operations positions, it simply wants to
stop adding staff. Its opex containment
results in the 2 years since it started its
telco cloud journey have been quite
encouraging.
The switch to VNFs from PNFs reduces
the time required to procure and install
the physical network elements or
appliances, which can otherwise exceed
3 months. Turkcell can start VNF testing
in a week or 2 from the decision to
launch a new application, and it can
test multiple VNFs in parallel in its new
lab. Turkcell can migrate new tested
functions into its network incrementally,
depending on its needs.
More flexibility to try new
vendors and swap functions in
and out
Capex savings and opex cost
containment
Time to market reduced through
the use of virtual rather than
physical functions
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
FURTHER INFORMATION
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Figure 3: Turkcell’s Unified NFVI high-level architecture and example live user and control plane VNFs1
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI is built on a simple and harmonious architecture composed of many open -source building blocks.
Red Hat, Affirmed and Odine Solutions collaborated with Turkcell and played critical roles in its cloud platform development and
deployment. Affirmed was the overall system integrator, focusing on platform performance. Odine was key to deployment and operation,
including integration with existing OSS/BSS. Red Hat provided consulting and training, along with key elements of the software stack (Red
Hat OpenStack Platform for virtual infrastructure management and Red Hat Ceph Storage). Turkcell tests and deploys VNFs based on
performance and cost.
7
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI high-level architecture block diagram
1 DPI: deep packet inspection; CG-NAT: carrier-grade network address translation; PCRF: policy charging rules function; AAA:
authentication, authorisation, accounting; ECS: enhanced communications services; TAS: telecoms application server; G-VNFM:
general VNF manager; SR-IOV: single root input/output virtualization; DPDK: data plane developer kit.
Source: Turkcell and Analysys Mason
Re
so
urc
es
Servers Switches
Vir
tua
lisa
tio
n
User plane VNFs Control plane VNFs
Management and orchestration
Virtual infrastructure
management
DPI CG-NAT
Data
optimisationAAA-
VoLTE
ECS
PCRF-
VoLTE
PCRF-
3G/4GNFV
orchestration
G-VNFM
TAS
SR-IOV
Service
assurance
DPDK KVM Open vSwitch
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Turkcell had to make a decision about using its existing and
mature IT cloud or building another private cloud for its telco-
specific requirements when it started its journey 2 years ago. It
found that the telco cloud’s high throughput demands require
much customisation. There are also complex networking
dependencies for service chaining as well as load-balancing for
each high-performance VNF. Finally, PNF and VNF coexistence is a
major prerequisite for fast and compatible service scaling. Thus,
Turkcell quickly realised that the design for its network cloud had
much more stringent requirements than its IT cloud in terms of
throughput, availability, load distribution and other performance
requirements, so it kept these clouds separate and created a new
concept in the company: the telco cloud.
Turkcell wanted to base its telco cloud ecosystem on an unified
NFVI platform that can host any VNF from both the incumbent
and new vendors. Vendors’ VNFs should be easily supported by
the VIM, which should be as close as possible to upstream
OpenStack. Creating a common platform was the key to boosting
the pace of virtualisation by eliminating potential conflicts of
interest between VNF and NFVI providers.
In 2 years, nine VNFs from six different vendors went live on the
Unified NFVI platform. Thousands of servers are now hosting
1.8Tbit/s of capacity in six POPs. When a new telecoms service is
proposed, Turkcell will be able to implement it from idea to
production within 3 months, a significant improvement.
Figure 4: Guiding principles of the Unified NFVI platform
8
Turkcell’s telco cloud project has succeeded thanks to its guiding principles
Choose platform
vendors
independently from
VNF vendors
Keep IT and telco
clouds separate
Source: Analysys Mason
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Cut launch time by three
months through
virtualisation1
Turkcell has achieved business agility benefits in three important
areas.
▪ It used to take Turkcell 6–8 weeks to get physical network
functions delivered to its lab, and additional time was
required to install it before it could be tested. For VNFs, that
upfront time is eliminated.
▪ Considering working with smaller or newer vendors, or
simply vendors that are new to Turkcell, is easier now.
Vendors that are solely focused on software development
can compete with the incumbent hardware platform
vendors.
▪ If a new VNF option comes to market with improved
performance or some other attractive advantage, Turkcell’s
switching costs are confined to any VNF licensing or
subscription sunk costs; the platform investment remains to
be reused by the new VNF.
Turkcell’s goals for the first years of the Unified NFVI project do
not include opex savings; it simply wants opex to stop rising with
traffic growth. It has posted significant capex savings for core
network investments, which equated to more than 10% of core
network capex in 2018.
Turkcell’s capex savings are expected to further increase in
upcoming years as it deploys new capacity and virtualised
services.
Figure 5: Benefits achieved by Turkcell to date
9
The benefits that Turkcell has achieved to date span cost savings and agility
1 Based on shrinking the time to market from at least 6 months to 2 months for a typical new voice service.
Easy to test scale
and operation of
‘digital native’
vendors’ solutions
KEY
BENEFITS
>10% of
core
network
capex in the
first year
Reduce
vendor lock-
in, increase
vendor
competition
Source: Analysys Mason
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Type Title Author(s) Link
Case study Telenor’s multi-vendor platform approach to NFV is
delivering cost efficiencies and a foundation for 5G
Caroline Chappell https://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Content/
Case-studies/telenor-nfv-initiative-rma16/
Case study Telefónica OnLife: lessons from a CORD pilot in Madrid Caroline Chappell https://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Content/
Case-studies/telefonica-onlife-report-rma16-rma04/
Case study X by Orange's digital business services brand is built on
OpenShift and AWS
Caroline Chappell https://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Content/
Case-studies/x-by-orange-RMA16-REN01-REN02/
Forecast report NFV use cases: worldwide forecast 2018–2022 Gorkem Yigit https://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Content/
Reports/NFV-cases-forecasts-RMA16/
Forecast report Digital infrastructure: worldwide forecast 2018–2022 Gorkem Yigit https://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Content/
Reports/digital-infrastructure-forecast-rma16/
Forecast report Network automation and orchestration: worldwide
forecast 2018–2022
Dana Cooperson
Gorkem Yigit
https://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Content/
Reports/nao-forecast-rma07/
Comment Red Hat’s customer value proposition: our software
solutions allow you to focus on your business
Dana Cooperson https://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Content/
Comments/red-hat-solutions-rma07-rma16-rma09/
10
Further reading
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
About the author
11
Dana Cooperson (Research Director) is the research director for Analysys Mason’s network-focused software research programmes. Her area
of expertise is intelligent fixed and mobile network infrastructure. Her goal is to help customers strengthen their link in the communications
value chain while evolving their business operations to benefit from, rather than be threatened by, shifts in the market. The key network
infrastructure trends Dana focuses on include the integration of communications and IT assets and the drive towards software-controlled,
virtual networking.
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
CONSULTING
We deliver tangible benefits to clients across the telecoms
industry:
▪ communications and digital service providers, vendors,
financial and strategic investors, private equity and
infrastructure funds, governments, regulators, broadcasters,
and service and content providers.
Our sector specialists understand the distinct local challenges
facing clients, in addition to the wider effects of global forces.
We are future-focused and help clients understand the challenges
and opportunities that new technology brings.
RESEARCH
Our dedicated team of analysts track and forecast the different
services accessed by consumers and enterprises.
We offer detailed insight into the software, infrastructure and
technology delivering those services.
Clients benefit from regular and timely intelligence, and direct
access to analysts.
Analysys Mason’s consulting services and research portfolio
12
Analysys Mason’s consulting and research are uniquely positioned
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Research from Analysys Mason
13
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
Consulting from Analysys Mason
14
Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage
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JULY 2019
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