Network Function Virtualization (NFV) allows network operators to reduce their dependence on single-purpose hardware appliances by taking the functions that were previously built into these expensive pieces of equipment and putting them into software that runs on industry-standard servers, network, and storage platforms.
This provides a unique opportunity for real-time analysis of information from networks, systems, and applications, helping to achieve a more detailed analysis of costs and margins. The ingestion of additional, non-network related information – such as application resource usage, virtual machine resource consumption, and other metrics - can result in a more robust and coherent cost and margin analytics process that makes decisions based not only on network traffic but also by taking into account the whole environment.
