News
Spirent Announces Standards-Based NFV Testing
Spirent Communications, specializing in testing solutions for the evolving software-defined networking (SDN) space, announced what it claims to be the first standards-based network functions virtualization (NFV) cloud testing platform.
The new Spirent CloudSure offering seeks to test NVF implementations to assure they meet the ETSI GS NFV-TST 001 standard.
NFV is part of the transformative SDN movement, with ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) describing it as means to implement network functions in software that can run on a range of industry standard server hardware. With NFV, former hardware-based networking solutions can be replaced by virtual network functions (VNFs) for functionality such as intrusion detection and intrusion prevention, network address translation (NAT), load balancing, WAN acceleration, caching, Gateway GPRS Support Nodes (GGSN), Session Border Controllers, domain name services (DNS) and many more.
The company describes CloudSure as an extensible and open test platform, which can help ensure NFV-based environments, including 5G implementaions just being rolled out.
"NFV is a complex and difficult set of technologies to navigate, with deployment of network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVi) and the functionality of virtual network functions (VNFs) providing many challenges," the company said in a recent announcement. "Spirent CloudSure delivers value in the form of test packages, consisting of a set of templates that can be easily configured and customized to match service providers’ unique NFV deployments. Configuration is possible via both a graphical user interface (GUI) and an application programming interface (API) for automation users, with Spirent TestCenter Virtual ports and Spirent CloudStress agents generating realistic, multi-dimensional workloads to assess cloud performance."
More information is available in a company data sheet.
No pricing information was provided in the news release, and the CloudSure site encourages requests for more information.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.