At the 7th meeting of ETSI’s Network Functions Virtualisation Industry Specification Group, co-hosted by Citrix and Ericsson in Santa Clara from 29 July to 1 August 2014, nine draft NFV documents were released for industry comment, a new leadership team was elected and plans for the next phase of NFV were laid down.

The nine draft documents made openly available for comment this week will together complete the first release of NFV when published at the end of the year. The ISG NFV has adopted a policy of making draft specifications openly available to the industry in order to encourage feedback. The documents released this week describe an infrastructure overview, the virtualized network functions architecture and the compute, hypervisor and infrastructure network domains. They also cover management and orchestration, resiliency, interfaces and abstractions, and security. These drafts are now available for industry comment from http://docbox.etsi.org/ISG/NFV/Open, and will be completed and published before the end of 2014.

As well as focusing on the technical content of the first release at this meeting, plans for the content and structure of the second phase of NFV were discussed and laid down. The main objectives of this next phase are to build on the achievements made in the first two years of the ISG and include interoperability, formal testing, as well as working closer with projects developing open source NFV implementations. The activities will include both normative and informative work. NFV ISG has chosen a new management team to carry the group forward. Dr. Steven Wright, of AT&T, was elected as chairman, and Mr. Nakamura Tetsuya, of NTT DoCoMo, was chosen as vice-chairman. Both are elected for a period of two years. Dr. Wright commented “I’d like to thank the outgoing chair, Prodip Sen, and all the ISG participants, for their hard work to bring the ISG to this point. I look forward to assisting the ISG as it continues to progress towards its goal of an open NFV ecosystem with interoperable implementations.”

The ETSI NFV ISG held its first meeting in January 2013. Since then it has grown to over 220 participating organizations, with over 300 delegates attending this last meeting. The first five ETSI Group Specifications resulting from the NFV ISG’s work were published in October 2013.