Continuing an aggressive push into the emerging market for service provider network functions virtualization (NFV) infrastructure, HP today unveiled a line of pre-integrated NFV infrastructure blocks targeting telcos.

Called HP NFV System, the modular kits integrating HP hardware and software are designed as a plug-and-play product for carriers looking to make a rapid transition from proof-of-concept to deployment.

The line's basic "starter kit" unit includes nodes for compute, storage, and control using Helion, HP's distribution of OpenStack. Three additional modules add compute, storage, and control capacity respectively.

Since launching its OpenNFV reference architecture early last year, HP has made inroads into carrier NFV with the platform. In March, European carrier giant Telefónica tapped OpenNFV as the framework for its NFV transformation project, hiring HP as systems integrator.

The new NFV System kits are a "packaged, pre-integrated, pre-tested subset" of the OpenNFV reference architecture, based on the most common use cases, HP said in a statement provided to SDxCentral. "The intent is that it comes from the factory ready to plug in to run VNFs, with no need for integration services."

NFV System does not include the OSS and orchestration layers defined in OpenNFV, however. Despite the "pre-integrated" design of the product line, HP Vice President of NFV Product Management Sarwar Raza tells us that the NFV System infrastructure blocks are interoperable with other vendors up through the stack.

"Our system and our architecture maps directly to the [European Telecommunications Standards Institute] architecture," says Raza. "We adhere to and expose any and all APIs that are needed for integration between the layers, for customers who want to use their own orchestration or somebody else's."

"This doesn't have to be an all-HP system."