pter 4, many service providers and data centers have standardized on the use of OpenStack in the cloud environment. However, the use of OpenStack has been focused on deployment and monitoring of VFs in the data centers (and lately, central offices) but not for the branch environment. OpenStack has addressed problems pertaining to highly scalable data centers, where thousands of servers are interconnected via gigabit links, whereas in a branch environment a Enterprise Networks single low-end compute server is used to deploy multiple functions across a bandwidth constrained WAN network. OpenStack still needs to evolve in terms of efficient use of compute resources, net- work resources, and support of distributed WAN topologies. There are projects underway within OpenStack and it is expected to have the optimizations and enhancements needed for use in a highly distributed environment. Until then, AT&T's plan has been to use a home grown system (based on open standards like NETCONF and YANG) to manage the virtualized branch environment. 10.5 DPI AND VISIBILITY DPI is commonly used in the security space for searching for protocol noncompliance, viruses, spam, intrusions, or defined criteria to decide whether the packet may pass (see Chapter 8). It is also used in the packet-forwarding space to allow for application layer routing, or for the purpose of col- lecting statistical information. Lately, DPI technology has been used in management platforms to provide a deeper understanding of current network traffic, which allows a simple graphical interface to control the network traffic on a per-application flow basis. Protocols such as the simple network management protocol (SNMP) that have been historically used for basic monitoring of network traf- fic, do not provide fine-grain traffic information. IT administrators were forced to deploy additional traffic analysis devices in the network (at a high cost) to get a deeper understanding of the actual traffic. Today, equipment vendors have implemented a DPI stack on the new