Exploring Danube by the Banks of the Seine

“Springtime in Paris”: what images does that phrase conjure up for you?

Well, if you’re a hotshot engineer working on the OPNFV project, it’s a vision of long days and late nights huddled over racks of hot, noisy servers while debugging complex interoperability problems. At least, that’s what we heard from our representatives to the recent OPNFV Plugfest….

OPNFV recently held their third Plugfest, hosted by Orange at their beautiful “Orange Gardens” facility in Paris from April 24^th through April 28^th, 2017. The plugfest was well attended, with 87 participants from 29 organizations that included six service providers.

The focus of this Plugfest was the new OPNFV Danube release and the final report was published a few days ago. It’s a fascinating summary of all the recent OPNFV achievements. As the report explains, “the Plugfest gave end-users and vendors the ability to try new hardware, installers, scenarios, test cases and tools while coming together as a community and solving problems collaboratively.”

The Wind River Titanium Cloud NFV infrastructure software platform featured prominently in the week’s testing activities. Three different hardware platforms, from Advantech, Huawei and Lenovo, used Titanium Cloud for their NFVI software.

One application of the Titanium Cloud platform was successfully hosting the Dovetail test suite that forms the basis of the upcoming Compliance Verification Program (CVP). Another was in multi-site testing: a Titanium Cloud region was connected to a region deployed using OPNFV Danube, with the two regions sharing common OpenStack services that included Keystone, Cinder and Glance. Using this environment, Dovetail, Yardstick, Functest and Storperf tests were all successfully executed, one region at a time.

As we talk to our customers about “compatibility,” we find the challenge is increasingly about demonstrating interoperability with other companies in the NFV ecosystem. From the service providers’ point of view, open standards avoid the risk of vendor lock-in by encouraging the development of compatible and interoperable solutions by multiple companies. But service providers typically incorporate products from more than one vendor in the complete solution that they deploy, so they need proof that products that should work together seamlessly actually do so. As OPNFV continues to make progress, we expect it to become a de facto standard against which all NFV and NFVI vendors will have to test their solutions.

Plugfests like the one hosted by Orange are vital as the telecom industry transitions from traditional, fixed-function equipment to dis-aggregated virtualized solutions that leverage best-in-class products from multiple vendors. Events like this demonstrate that an industry-wide ecosystem can successfully form around open standards and deliver interoperable, compatible products.

At Wind River, we’re proud to have contributed to all three OPNFV Plugfest held so far and we look forward to even more exciting and advanced accomplishments at the next one.