Turkcell’s Unified NFVI: a platform built on Red Hat OpenStack … · Turkcell’s Unified NFVI:...

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 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 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



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



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


FURTHER INFORMATION


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 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



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



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/

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Further reading


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.


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