Speaker: Itai Segall, Bell Labs

Title:  Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) - the rush for gold, and the obstacles on the way

Abstract:
Today, most functions in a typical network operator's operations are implemented in proprietary hardware. This introduces many types of issues - 
from increasing demand of space and power, to huge complexity in maintenance and progress. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is 
a paradigm that tries to address these problems by leveraging standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment 
types onto industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage, which could be located in Datacentres, Network Nodes and in
the end user premises.
In this talk, I will introduce NFV, some of its use cases and its potential. I will then  survey some of the challenges one encounters when 
developing NFV applications (some of them applicable to Cloud applications in general), and their underlying infrastructure. I will briefly 
summarize with some of the directions in which we, in Bell Labs Israel, try to tackle these challenges.

Bio:
Itai Segall is a Bell Labs Researcher, interested in different aspects of software development and quality – especially in the domain of
Cloud and NFV. Before joining Bell Labs, Itai was a Research Staff Member in IBM Research, where his research was focused on 
software quality and test planning. Itai Holds a PhD and MSc from the Weizmann Institute and a BA from the Technion – all in Computer Science.