NFV/SDN Reality Check – Episode 14: Overture, partners release NFV performance test numbers

On this week’s NFV/SDN Reality Check we talked with Mike Heffner, senior director of technical product marketing at Overture Networks, about recently released results of a collaborative effort showing robust performance of NFV service chaining.
Overture said the testing, which was done in partnership with Brocade, Intel and Spirent, showed “zero packet loss throughput” for a pair of gigabit ports carrying “line-rate IMIX traffic through multiple [virtual network functions]in a pure-play NFV environment.” The company noted that “pure-play NFV” is considered the running of software VNFs on standards servers with no specialized networking hardware.
The testing was said to include a combination of Overture’s Ensemble Carrier Ethernet VNF, Brocade’s Vyatta 5600 virtual router and Spirent’s TestCenter Virtual, which were all orchestrated by Overture’s Ensemble Service Orchestrator and testing performed on an Intel Atom C2000 processor-based server acting as the VNF hosting platform. Telecom provider Integra Telecom also participated as an observer of all tests and verified the results.
Overture CTO Prayson Pate said the server platform cost less than $1,000, which is an important part of NFV’s promise to allow telecom operators to tap into generic hardware in order to run virtualized services.
Testing gauged the performance of Overture’s VNF by itself and in a service chain with one or more of Brocade’s Vyatta virtual routers. Overture said its ECE switching VNF “delivered wire-speed throughput in all tests,” with the tests using a “realistic mix of frame sizes, using a frame length distribution model based on Internet backbone traffic.”
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