To help assure that NFV roll-outs will be successful, Spirent today announced a new NFV testing platform, which is called Spirent CloudSure.
Spirent claims that CloudSure is the first commercially available testing platform for assuring NFV performance based on the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's (ETSI) GS NFV-TST 001 specification.
Earlier this year, ETSI announced the first version of ETSI GS NFV-SOL 001, which is a specification that includes NFV descriptors based on the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA.)
RELATED: ETSI unveils new standard for NFV deployment templates
Spirent CloudSure includes test packages consisting of a set of templates that can be configured and customized to match service providers’ NFV deployments. Configuration is possible via both a graphical user interface (GUI) and an API for automation users, with Spirent TestCenter Virtual ports and Spirent CloudStress agents generating multi-dimensional workloads to assess cloud performance.
“By helping to understand NFV and cloud infrastructure performance and gain actionable insights into poor performance, CloudSure enables service providers to deliver expected QoE (quality of experience) to end users and assure successful NFV deployments,” said Abhitesh Kastuar, general manager of Spirent’s cloud and IP business, in a statement.
Spirent, which was founded in London in 1936, has a long track record as a testing and service assurance vendor
While CloudSure is tackling NFV from ETSI's point of view, there are numerous other attempts to ease the pain points of deploying NFV.
At this year's Open Networking Summit, Lean NFV came out of stealth mode to introduce its concept around simplifying NFV by breaking it down to three components. Also at ONS, the Linux Foundation announced a new compliance and testing program for VNFs to make it easier to deploy NFV.
The VNF testing and compliance program is designed to feed into the Common NFVi Telco Task Force, which is comprised of AT&T, Bell Canada, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Jio, Orange, SK Telecom, Telstra, Verizon and Vodafone. The companies in the task force have joined hands to simplify and reduce the number of network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVi) platforms that are currently in the marketplace.