Hong Kong, July 8, 2015 — Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR) announced that it has joined the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), a carrier-grade integrated open source flexible platform designed to accelerate time-to-market when developing new products and services using NFV (network function virtualization). As an open source project, OPNFV aims to bring together standards organizations, open source communities, and commercial vendors to provide a de facto standard open source NFV platform for industry use.

NFV enables communication services to be built by virtualizing entire network nodes and function classes into building blocks using IT virtualization technology and connecting these building blocks together. By participating in working groups within OPNFV, Altera will contribute to expanding the utilization of FPGA accelerators in virtual machines running different software and processes on industry-standard modular servers, storage, and cloud computing infrastructure.

Francis Chow, Vice President and General Manager of Altera's Communications Business Group, said, "By using FPGAs, we provide an excellent solution for NFV applications that significantly enhances the power of virtual machine applications while reducing power consumption. Furthermore, by using FPGAs in NFV applications, we provide a more efficient solution that can reduce capital and operational expenses, accelerate service deployment, and advance product time-to-market."

By operating FPGAs as accelerators, power consumption can be reduced while offloading workloads from GPGPUs (general-purpose graphics processing units) and CPUs (central processing units). This enables data centers to operate more efficiently. Data centers are already accelerating servers by using FPGA and SoC-based solutions in search and convolutional neural network applications.

Heather Kirksey, Director of OPNFV, said, "OPNFV aims to build an open platform that can be used when diverse stakeholders from various sectors come together to accelerate NFV. With Altera's participation as a new Silver member, we can make significant contributions to realizing the goal of open source NFV."

OPNFV Initiated from Service Providers

Interest in OPNFV initially grew from the community of network service providers such as AT&T, China Mobile, NTT DOCOMO, Telecom Italia, and Vodafone, who were OPNFV founding members. Recently, companies from other sectors such as financial services, enterprises, and cloud service providers have also begun to show interest in recognizing and utilizing the benefits of NFV.

Explanation of OPNFV (Open Platform for NFV)

The Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) is a carrier-grade integrated open source reference platform designed to enable rapid deployment of new products and services using NFV. OPNFV is an open forum where service providers, vendors, and users collaborate and work together to continuously improve NFV technology. More detailed information about OPNFV can be found at http://www.opnfv.org.

OPNFV is one of the collaborative projects of The Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation's collaborative projects are independently funded software projects that leverage the strengths of collaborative development to accelerate innovation across diverse industries and ecosystems.