NEW YORK, NY — (Marketwired) — 05/23/16 — The (NIA) will hold a Live NFV Interoperability Demo at the (BCE) in Austin, Texas, on May 23-24.
The demo, to include products from 12 vendors, will showcase Service Function Chaining (SFC) and Network Service Orchestration (NSO) with a functional focus on virtual Consumer Premise Equipment (vCPE) as part of a realistic, neutral set of test cases based on public standards, open source community developments and market feedback. Participants of the Live NFV Interoperability Demo will include ADTRAN, ADVA Optical Networking, Allot Communications, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Dell, Fortinet, Ixia, Juniper Networks, NetNumber, Nokia and UBlqube.
“Through our partnership with EANTC and in collaboration with the NIA–s service provider membership, these bold NIA members will demonstrate the interoperability of their virtualization products in a very public forum — the Big Communications Event,” said Jeff Hannah, Director of The New IP Agency. “The NIA is at the forefront of progressing the communications industry towards open and interoperable virtualized networking technologies. The tests these vendors agreed to participate in provide a glimpse into the future of our industry. Open and interoperable products will be key to vendors– success, and by participating in the demonstration, NIA members are obtaining — in a collaborative and multi-vendor environment — the needed experience and understanding to meet service providers– demands for fully open and interoperable virtualized networks.”
Both network virtualization as well as service orchestration are in their earliest days, with vendors at various stages of their virtualized product development cycle. For that reason, NIA and testing partner asked a team of service providers to put the plan through a rigorous review process. The outcome was a set of eight test cases that demonstrate multi-vendor SFC and NSO with a vCPE deployment. Of the eight test cases outlined, vendors were able to successfully achieve five of the test cases.
“With this showcase, NIA and EANTC put a stake in the ground — pioneering industry-wide NFV interoperability. Our test plan for just one week of testing turned out to be ambitious due to the installation and integration efforts. We still achieved a substantial number of successful test results in complex three-, four- or five-party combinations,” said Carsten Rossenhoevel, Managing Director of EANTC. “As always, we publish detailed results and lessons learned, which will be taken into account to shape the next phases of NIA–s interoperability test program.”
A report capturing the outcomes of the demo is available publicly here: . The report, based upon results compiled during the “hot-staging week” in early May, provides the communications industry with an understanding of the industry–s progression towards the adoption of SFC and NSO. The functional component to the demonstration–s focus is important as service providers seek to extend new services to end users via virtual CPEs — a key component to the business case for service providers– migration to virtualized networking.
The ideation of the NIA was announced in June 2015 at Light Reading–s Big Telecom Event and, recognizing the important role that the NIA offers the communications industry, Light Reading underwrote the “pre-phase” expense of launching the NIA, which included the NIA–s initial test phase on VNF-NFVi interoperability at the end of 2015. Now the NIA operates as a completely self-funded not-for-profit supported by the NIA–s membership and conducts periodic multi-vendor evaluations that address the fundamental building blocks of NFV.
Several of the Live NFV Interoperability Demo–s participants (Cisco Systems, Ixia, Juniper Networks, NetNumber and Nokia, plus additional NIA member companies IneoQuest, Metaswitch, Procera and Sonus) successfully participated in the NIA–s previous , contributing to the NIA–s mission of educating the industry on available open and interoperable NFV solutions. In the second half of 2016, the NIA will introduce two more interoperability evaluations for member companies to participate in. These evaluations will be drafted with input from the NIA–s membership and the service provider community.
The New IP Agency (NIA) () is a not-for-profit 501(c)(6) (pending IRS approval) independent initiative providing information, education, analysis, community services and testing to support and accelerate the development of a global economy based on open, advanced, virtualized IP networks.
European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC) is internationally recognized as one of the world–s leading independent test centers for telecommunication technologies. Based in Berlin, Germany, the company offers vendor-neutral consultancy and realistic, reproducible high-quality testing services since 1991. Customers include leading network equipment manufacturers, tier-1 service providers, large enterprises and governments worldwide. EANTC–s proof of concept, acceptance tests and network audits cover established and next-generation fixed and mobile network technologies.
For more information about the New IP Agency and how to join, please contact
Jeff Hannah
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