icted to creating product differentiation (vis-à- vis other vendors) only via software. These solutions are also lowering the barriers to entry for new vendors in the market; new entrants can launch cost-effective products much more quickly since they do not have to worry about the development of hardware. 10.3 MEMORY AND STORAGE RESOURCES In the sections above, we discussed evolving technology options for optimized use of I/O and CPU resources. In addition, we need to also look at memory and storage. In our use-cases, while memory and storage did not have huge impact on the throughput, they do prove to be a big cost component for the CPE. Since, many products or solutions came from a datacenter world where memory is plentiful (hard drives), many vendor designs do not pay much attention to optimized memory use. For the CPE, because of cost constraints, it is essential to implement a solution within the limita- tions of available memory and storage. This involves optimizations such as reducing the size of the images, the amount of storage allocated for writing log files, memory map files, and reducing or right-sizing memory reservations for the CPE platform. In particular, with a platform approach, where one wants to run multiple VNFs from different vendors on the same platform, the efficient use of memory and storage is critical [9]. 10.4 NETWORK MANAGEMENT AND ORCHESTRATION Network management and orchestration are most critical for the simplification of the network envi- ronment, both at the stage of deployment and over the life cycle. This is one area where we can see significant changes in the industry. The strong industry-wide focus on SDN brought concepts such as network programmability to center stage. This essentially reignited the discussion on how one should design a product for orchestration and management of network elements. In conjunction with an SDN approach, wide-spread adoption of network function virtualization and the cloud services model are the main driving forces that are shaping the manageme