Exploring Danube by the banks of the Seine

At least, that’s the message from Wind River representatives at the recent OPNFV Plugfest.

OPNFV recently held their third Plugfest, hosted by Orange at the beautiful ‘Orange Gardens’ facility in Paris from 24-28^th April 2017. The plugfest was well attended, with 87 participants from 29 organisations that included six service providers.

The focus of this Plugfest was the new OPNFV Danube release and the final report was published a few days ago. It’s a fascinating summary of all the recent OPNFV achievements.

The report explained: “The Plugfest gave end-users and vendors the ability to try new hardware, installers, scenarios, test cases and tools while coming together as a community and solving problems collaboratively.”

The Wind River Titanium Cloud NFV infrastructure software platform featured prominently in the week’s testing activities. Three different hardware platforms, from Advantech, Huawei and Lenovo, used Titanium Cloud for their NFVI software.

One application of the Titanium Cloud platform was successfully hosting the Dovetail test suite that forms the basis of the upcoming Compliance Verification Program (CVP). Another was in multi-site testing: a Titanium Cloud region was connected to a region deployed using OPNFV Danube, with the two regions sharing common OpenStack services that included Keystone, Cinder and Glance. Using this environment, Dovetail, Yardstick, Functest and Storperf tests were all successfully executed, one region at a time.

As Wind River talked to customers about ‘compatibility,’ it found the challenge was increasing about demonstrating interoperability with other companies in the NFV ecosystem.

From the service providers’ point of view, open standards avoid the risk of vendor lock-in by encouraging the development of compatible and interoperable solutions by multiple companies. But service providers typically incorporate products from more than one vendor in the complete solution that they deploy, so they need proof that products that should work together seamlessly actually do so.

As OPNFV continues to make progress, Wind River expects it to become a de facto standard against which all NFV and NFVI vendors will have to test solutions.

Plugfests like the one hosted by Orange are vital as the telecom industry transitions from traditional, fixed-function equipment to dis-aggregated virtualised solutions that leverage best-in-class products from multiple vendors. Events like this demonstrate that an industry-wide ecosystem can successfully form around open standards and deliver interoperable, compatible products.

At Wind River, it said it was proud to have contributed to all three OPNFV Plugfest held to this date, and there is much more to look forward to.

Courtesy of Wind River.