Software-defined networking and network function virtualization are gaining considerable momentum in the telecom space and bring with them new challenges for benchmarking, testing and monitoring virtual systems instead of proprietary hardware.
“Proactive and reactive performance monitoring, identification of failures, isolation of any faulty network functions and corrective action are as important in virtual environments as they are in physical environments. But they are also more challenging,” Spirent noted in a white paper on testing methodologies for NFV.
Infonetics has predicted that the SDN/NFV market will reach $11 billion by 2018, impacting everything from the data center and large enterprises to deep-packet inspection, and that the lion’s share of the market over the next few years will go to NFV. Vendors including Spirent, Ixia, JDSU and others have already made moves to support that fast-developing ecosystem so that NFV can be tested rigorously to ensure on-par performance to that which operators and enterprises have come to expect from hardware.
Cobham Wireless announced the official launch today of its TeraVM elastic test bed, which allows NFV testing resources to be shared globally. Rather than physical test equipment that sits in a single lab and is utilized 20-30% of the time, TeraVM can boost utilization time to 80-90% because the virtual resources can be accessed by multiple labs, according to Robert Winters, TeraVM director with Cobham Wireless.
Winters said that Cobham already has its elastic test bed for NFV testing deployed with more than 100 customers in 25 countries, and that it is initially targeting service providers and network infrastructure vendors that are transitioning their hardware to NFV.
He said that he is starting to hear the terms “zero-touch” and “high-touch” for research and development labs, with “high-touch” seen as the traditional lab with racks of test equipment and devices under test, with a move toward “zero-touch” labs where resources are virtualized.
“A zero-touch lab is where any engineer, at any time, anywhere, can call upon a virtual resource to test, and virtual resources like TeraVM, to test with,” Winters said. He said that one of Cobham’s large customers has global labs deployed and is “trying to reduce the footprint in high-touch labs. The trend is definitely toward that type of zero-touch environment where you can have a bunch of engineers in San Jose and a bunch of engineers in Bangalore, all tapping into one pool of shared test resources.”
Winters did add, however, that while a completely zero-touch lab environment is probably not attainable at this point, the trend is there.
“At the end of the day for most carriers, the key thing is reducing [operating expenditures] by deploying NFV, and this extends all the way through to testing,” Winters said. “The idea is that we will reduce opex by creating the ability for them to use all of their test assets.”
