Service providers are one of the main buyer and consumers of networking hardware. They buy and deploy routers, switches, firewalls and other networking equipment much more than enterprises. They have a very large footprint of hardware appliances. This footprint grows and the burden of managing and operating it also grows (at a different rate). NFV and network virtualization can help service providers to reduce their complex management and operation as well as reducing their cost by utilizing SDN and NFV.
Many networking gurus are hesitant to trust a server to run a virtual router or firewall. They are still not comfortable with using virtualization technology to run their core networking functions. However this will change, as server administrators also had the same feeling when virtualization was starting to spread.
The key point for network specialists is reliability. A hardware appliance such as router...