Lab aimed at speeding development, implementation of SDN/NFV
Broadband Forum and the China-based SDN/NFV Industry Alliance plan to set up a joint lab in China for testing aimed at accelerating the development and implementation of software-defined networking and network function virtualization.
The two organizations will work together to build the new Open Broadband Laboratory Asia for the “acceleration of go-to-market and go-to-production for new services and applications, and the migration from existing broadband infrastructures to cloud-based ones introducing NFV and SDN technologies,” according to a statement on the lab.
Broadband Forum will provide technical direction, the standards framework and testing methods as well as domain expertise; SDN/NFV Industry Alliance will construct and manage the lab and conduct testing to include conformance and interoperabilty testing, as well as exploring best practices for migration to SDN/NFV and technical due diligence and training. The two organizations said that the lab’s goal is to develop standards verification, solution conformance and testing as well as to be a proving ground for new services.
The SDN/NFV Industry Alliance was founded by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), together with 15 organizations in the industry and now has more than 70 member companies. The new lab partnership is in line with its focus on “increasing the readiness in SDN commercial utilization and promoting the healthy development of the SDN industry,” the company said.
“As operators look to bring the efficiencies of data centers and cloud technologies to the network, gradually transforming it to a software-based infrastructure, it is incredibly important that we speed up standards, testing, conformance and best practice to ensure smarter, programmable and faster networks that deliver leading edge capability for operators and world-class experience for their customers,” said Broadband Forum Chairman Kevin Foster, of BT, in a statement. “This new lab facility is a strategic and natural evolution of the Forum’s ongoing work on virtualization and cloud, with almost every project in our current scope now connected to these next-generation network technologies.”
Wei Leping, president of the SDN/NFV Industry Alliance, added that “the lack of standards and a unified framework for Network Cloud and SDN is a significant problem, which leads to fragmentation in the industry and defeats interoperability, slowing the industry’s development. As one of the most important organizations in broadband, the Broadband Forum’s Open Broadband Lab can be the unified and standardized platform to address the fragmentation issues and resolve the problems the industry is facing.”
