June 30 2017, Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, today announced it has unveiled its new network function virtualisation (NFV) product ZXR10 V6000 vRouter & vMSR at Mobile World Congress (MWC) Shanghai. The product has been applied in ZTE’s Central Office Re-architected as Datacenter (CORD), elastic virtual private network (VPN) cloud private line and virtual data centre (vDC) solutions as basic components of the service support system.

This new NFV product is a ZTE self-developed X86-based pure software router, which employs modular, distributed and separated control plane/forwarding plane architecture. The control plane is configured with 1:1 redundancy and the forwarding plane supports dynamic capacity expansion/reduction according to network demands. It maximally supports the expansion of 254 virtual machines to meet the performance requirements in different scenarios. Meanwhile, it provides a service chain expansion function to perform flexible service orchestration together with the NFV management platform and orchestration system, creating flexible and diversified network value-added platforms. Based on standard European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV architecture, it can run on ZTE’s Tulip Elastic Cloud System (TECS) cloud operating system platform or third-party virtual platforms such as VMware and KVM, meeting the customers’ requirement for decoupling of three layers of server, cloud, and applications.  

The ZXR10 V6000 virtual router plays an important role in the access layer, metro-area network (MAN), edge data centre (DC), and IP core of the transport network. For instance, running on the X86 platform, the V6000 can implement the functions of the control plane of transport network elements such as router reflector (RR), path computation element (PCE), and virtual broadband remote access server (vBRAS). It supports software-defined networking (SDN) evolution in control and forwarding plane separation. It also supports the NFV evolution of transport network functions such as vRouter, vFirewall, vLoadBalance implemented by software in X86. Additionally, it can replace hardware routers such as virtual customer premise equipment (vCPE), virtual customer edge (vCE), virtual provider edge (vPE), and virtual data centre-gateway (vDC-GW). The ZXR10 V6000, deployed in proper scenarios, can not only implement various service functions and improve network elasticity, but also reduce operators’ hardware investment and improve their return on investment (ROI).

In the past few years, ZTE has made broad cooperation with global operators in  SDN/NFV field and accumulated rich experience. “After several years’ deep cultivation in the SDN/NFV field, ZTE unveils the ZXR10 V6000 vRouter & vMSR. The complete set of virtualisation devices together with various solutions can greatly help customers build elastic, agile, open and intelligent networks,” said Mr. Hu Longbin, Deputy General Manager of ZTE Bearer Network.