ICT standards are born after a complex process involving proposals, drafting, testing, reviews and evaluations, trials and errors, and much decision-making, all focused on building consensus across the board. Plugtests events are an essential part of this process. Revolving around a certain standard, Plugtests events allow designers of electronic equipment or software to test the interoperability of their products or designs with those of other manufacturers: a key step to finding the common ground necessary to achieve better product quality, increased safety, lower costs and happy customers.
The 5TONIC Laboratory, which is headquartered at IMDEA Networks Institute, in Madrid (Spain), has hosted two weeks of intense and rewarding plugtest sessions on the interoperability of the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) standard, organized by ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, and counting with the technical backing of Telefonica.
The 1st ETSI NFV Interoperability event was a challenging enterprise in terms of the maturity of the technology used and of the complexity of the pre-testing phase, combined with an extensive, dynamic and proactive number of on-site participants (up to 64 on the days of maximum attendance) and of remote connections.
The event unraveled as follows: after the pre-testing and remote integration phase launched in November 2016, came the on-site infrastructure deployment in late January 2017, followed by seven and a half days of interoperability test sessions among local and remote NFV components, concluding on February 3rd.
The 30 companies that took part on these sessions performed a variety of tests combining Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs), Management and Orchestration (MANO) solutions and NFV Platforms. ETSI is now analyzing the overall results and shall feed back to the participants, a unique opportunity to stimulate synergy and alignment across the NFV ecosystem.
The list of participant companies at this event included: A10 Networks, ADVA Optical Networking, Anritsu A/S, Canonical USA Inc., Cisco Systems, EANTC, Ericsson, F5 Networks, Fortinet, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Intel, Italtel, Ixia, Keynetic Technologies, Lenovo, Mahindra Comviva, Netrounds, Openet, Palo Alto Networks, Radware, Red Hat, RIFT.io, Sandvine, Sonus Networks, Spirent, Telefonica, Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU), VMware y Wind River.
5TONIC wishes to acknowledge the contribution of HPE España to the success of this event.
Event participants outside the IMDEA Networks building.