Canonical creates first VNF Performance Interoperability Lab (V-PIL)

Canonical announces the creation of the first VNF Performance Interoperability Lab for scale out infrastructure

• Enables service providers to rigorously test their VNF performance and interoperability before deploying in live network architecture
• Dramatic reduction in cost and time for deploying new services
• Affirmed, Metaswitch and GENBAND among first VNF partners to engage with program

Announced at Mobile World Congress 2016, Canonical is proud to announce the creation of its VNF Performance Interoperability Lab (V-PIL) to provide independent performance testing, interoperability, and validation of virtualized network functions in a multi-vendor environment for customer evaluation.

Building off the success of Canonical’s OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) and the rapidly growing Network Function Virtualization infrastructure (NFVi) deployments on Ubuntu at carriers such as AT&T and Deutsche Telekom, V-PIL will provide three fundamental services required for evaluating different NFV applications; deployment automation, performance testing, and functional interoperability testing.

The VNF Performance Interoperability Lab can be utilized in-house at an existing customer-owned testing facility or in Canonical’s own labs. V-PIL at its foundation includes a heterogeneous compute infrastructure including hardware based on Intel x86, ARM and POWER8. Each test generates reports on metrics, functional compliance, analytics, and performance.

“Working with Canonical and our OpenPOWER Foundation partners in the V-PIL program allows us to take advantage of a multi-platform, multi-vendor environment with powerful automation tools designed to accelerate interoperability and ease of deployment of new NFV applications. In addition, by providing access to OpenPOWER-based systems, we’re able to achieve a deeper collaboration with our NFV ecosystem partners and further extend the reach of OpenPOWER Foundation-based innovation into the telecommunications industry.” said Richard Talbot, Director, IBM Power Systems, Cloud Infrastructure.

Carrier VNF deployment models can be saved to be easily redeployed as part of a continuous integration and continuous deployment plan to support the rapidly evolving NFV solution space.  This drastically reduces the lifecycle costs of testing and deploying a service from proof of concept to production, as well as improving reliability to meet SLAs.

“Canonical’s V-PIL Program will allow service providers to more effectively deploy VNFs in their networks with a higher level of certainty,” said Paul Drew, SVP of Mobile Technology at Metaswitch.  “We are excited to be working with Canonical and look forward to supporting this program”

“We at Affirmed have been a catalyst for the journey of the operators from merely evaluating NFV based solutions to a widespread adoption of software-based network architectures that now serves as the foundation of a new breed of networks and services,” said Amit Tiwari, vice president strategic alliances and systems engineering at Affirmed Networks.  “For this evolution to be successful, however, there needs to be support and collaboration from across the ecosystem focused on mitigating challenges before the deployment stage to ensure the smoothest path for mobile operators as part of this transformation.  For this reason, we applaud the efforts and investments that Canonical is making to ensure the success of our customer deployments as we drive this seminal technology evolution”

“NFV is fundamentally changing how service providers operate their network. GENBAND has been at the forefront of this transition with a differentiated Virtual Network Functions (VNF) portfolio that includes fully virtualized, high-performance communications signaling, control and media management solutions with a VNF Management framework and open APIs that enables seamless interoperability with other VNFs and cloud infrastructure components.”, said Sanjay Bhatia, Vice President  of Solutions Marketing and Strategy at GENBAND.”This only works if the interoperability of the VNF and cloud components of the NFV ecosystem can be demonstrated. Canonical’s VNF Performance Interoperability Lab (V-PIL) not only addresses the interoperability, but also evaluates the performance of these NFV environments. GENBAND has firsthand experience with Canonical’s Generic VNF Manager Juju and we are delighted to work with Canonical’s V-PIL program to help our customers move to NFV faster.”

“The disaggregation of telco infrastructure enables flexible, innovative and more cost effective solutions to be brought into the core of the network”, said John Zannos, VP Cloud Alliances and Business Development at Canonical. “This new programme ensures that telco requirements of robustness and availability can be met and as members of OSM and OPNFV, we are uniquely positioned to provide independent testing and evaluation methods to help our carrier customers deploy these new architectures faster.”

You can find out more information about this announcement in John’s blog.