Validating ADVA's Virtual Switch
As Light Reading has already established, 2016 is set to be the year when NFV capabilities emerge from being at the heart of multiple proofs of concept (PoCs) and start to play a key role in next-generation communications service provider and large enterprise networks. (See NFV: Coming, Ready or Not!)
As a result, we're on course to witness many network operators move beyond just RFIs and RFPs and make their initial NFV-related procurement decisions.
That's why it's important for the vendor community to prove that their virtualization products are ready for commercial deployment and that they can deliver real benefits to the network operators that need to develop new business opportunities using such capabilities.
Independent test reports provide a key reference point for those operators, as Light Reading has noted before: They provide a valuable validation of capabilities that help to shorten the operator's own evaluation cycle.
That's why ADVA opted for an independent evaluation of its virtual switch, the Ensemble Connector, which can be deployed as the customer premises equipment (CPE) component of a New IP-enabled, NFV infrastructure (NFVi) that can support commercial virtual network functions (VNFs).
Light Reading's long-time test lab partner EANTC devised the evaluation program and performed the tests, which measured the performance and scalability of the Ensemble Connector and compared it with the standard implementation of open vSwitch.
As you will read on the following pages, which describes the test processes and results in detail, ADVA has developed a virtual switch that not only performs much better than a regular open vSwitch implementation, but which is also designed to function in virtualized service provider environments.
You can find out more about the evaluation by accessing the archived webinar, ADVA’s Virtual Switch vs OVS: Test Results.
You can also download this report as a PDF: Just click on this link to access and download the document.
So let's get to the report, which is presented over a number of pages as follows:
Page 2: EANTC's introduction and test cases
Page 3: Throughput performance
Page 7: Hardware and software in the test
— The Light Reading team and Carsten Rossenhövel, managing director, European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC) (http://www.eantc.de/), an independent test lab in Berlin. EANTC offers vendor-neutral network test facilities for manufacturers, service providers, and enterprises.
