NFV (Network Function Virtualization)

I came across few commercial solutions to justify the buzz word NFV, where a merchant silicon function of FPGA,ASICs are moved on to the software and a very good example is in below video where Mobile Core Packet Network (EPC - Evolved Packet Core) is virtualized as software

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/events/corporate/mobile-world-congress-2013/mwc-evolved-packet-core.html


http://www.sdncentral.com/companies/6wind-nfv-interview-2013/2013/08/

Some other network function virtualization i can recognize are

• Any critical data plane traffic could be a good candidate for NFV
• DPI ( Deep Packet Inspection) 
• Switching (OVS is now part of linux)
• See 6WINDGate ; Maximizing the switching performance of the virtual switch to provide high-bandwidth to the VNF running in VMs thereby increasing the aggregated bandwidth delivered to the VMs. Second, it accelerates the data plane performance of each VNF
• A good use case is : In any traditional network each hardware does a separate function in a network, in the newer NFV based network multi-tenant solutions solved CAPEX and OPEX 

Another good example of open source project NFV-IMS (i.e)Virtualize the IP Multimedia subsystem network components see http://www.projectclearwater.org/

http://www.sdncentral.com/news/nfv-comes-life-sdn-openflow-world-congress/2013/10/