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Hewlett-Packard is bullish on the future of the cloud and on network functions virtualization (NFV). Helping to lead HP’s NFV and cloud efforts is Senior Vice President Saar Gillai, who is also the general manager for NFV as well as the chief operating officer for HP Cloud.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Gillai discusses the promise and the opportunity of NFV in the emerging cloud era. While NFV is sometimes confused with software-defined networking (SDN), it’s actually something somewhat more specific.
“NFV is about the cloudification of network functions; just virtualizing network functions isn’t enough,” Gillai said.
Gillai explained that NFV is about more than just running virtual machines for networking; it’s also about enabling networking with cloud attributes including on-demand access and scale-out capabilities.
While NFV is still a relatively new idea and a new business for HP, it’s one that has a bright future.
“It’s a huge opportunity,” Gillai said.
There a number of reasons why NFV represents a huge opportunity for HP, including the fact that it’s what Gillai refers to as a greenfield opportunity.
“We’re the disruptor here, not the disrupted,” Gillai said. “It’s a net new market for us, and it’s also going into the cloud, where we have been operating very well.”
Additionally, NFV leverages standardized hardware and servers, which is an area of strength for HP. The opportunity for HP includes server, networking, software and cloud components.
Looking more broadly just at the cloud, Gillai has long been playing a leading role in HP’s OpenStack cloud efforts. One of the efforts he has been involved with are OpenStack consulting services. Much of the work on the consulting side is about integration into existing environments.
Watch the full video interview with Saar Gillai below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.