TMCnet News

NEC Validates Network Service Virtualization with the Open Networking User Group
[May 13, 2015]

NEC Validates Network Service Virtualization with the Open Networking User Group


NEC Corporation of America (NEC (News - Alert)), a leading technology integrator of advanced IT, communications and networking solutions, today announced the successful completion of ONUG's first testing program to validate its ProgrammableFlow SDN fabric against key IT requirements from the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Conference at Columbia University. The ONUG use case validation testing is a landmark event in the networking industry, signaling the first time commercial solutions are being tested against requirements outlined by the ONUG Working Groups. This extensive, three-month long testing process was conducted by Ixia (News - Alert) in conjunction with ONUG.

The ONUG tests aim to provide proof of concepts, feature validation, and demonstrations to ensure that the networking solutions in the network overlays, SD-WAN, and network services virtualization areas deliver on the top 10 requirements developed by the ONUG Working Groups. Network Service Virtualization (NSV) is critical to ONUG members because it enables on-demand service delivery, reduces CapEx of network appliances, decreases configuration time, and increases network speed to deploy new services. ProgrammableFlow's SDN fabric enables on-demand orchestration of data flows for network service insertion and real-time flow logical and virtual visibility to reduce network troubleshooting.

The key NEC ProgrammableFlow SDN solution features that were tested included the following:

  • Successfully tested on-demand service insertion of physical and virtual network services; the tests were completed on a multivendor switch fabric, illustrating how advanced services can be provisioned and managed without having to be locked into a single network vendor.
  • Verified that NEC's SDN fabric is easily adaptable to existing physical and logical network services and new virtual instances services, unlike alternative solutions that require replacing existing network services to upgrade.
  • Demonstrated support for open and standard APIs (JSON, XML format) for tools and application integration with third-party vendors.
  • Showed agile networking for mission-critical applications through fast failure detection, convergence and recovery.
  • Demonstrated SDN interoperability with switches from NEC, Dell and NoviFlow.
  • Testing included network services from Radware (News - Alert), Riverbed, F5 and virtual platforms from VMWare, Mcrosoft and CentOS.



"The ONUG testing further illustrates the mission-critical and production-ready nature of our award-winning ProgrammableFlow Networking Suite," said Don Clark, director business development, NEC Corporation of America. "Our ProgrammableFlow SDN solutions solve the real challenges in today's networks."

"We were delighted to have NEC on board with ONUG this spring. These tests underscore our commitment to the ONUG community of IT executives and vendors to validate product features that meet IT business leader requirements for enterprise cloud infrastructure," said Nick Lippis, chairman and co-founder of ONUG. "We are confident that this testing effort with partners such as NEC will assist in moving the open infrastructure industry from technology curiosity to operations."


ONUG Working Groups

ONUG's six current working groups represent the centerpiece of the IT community's work toward bringing software defined networking to the larger networking industry. SDN has been a work in progress, requiring much-needed user input and leadership to affect the development of commercial products.

ONUG kicked off its initial three working groups, focused on Virtual Networks/Overlays, Network Services Virtualization, and Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), in the spring of 2014 to develop use cases and associated requirements. Headed by members of the ONUG board and top IT business leaders, the working groups represent user-driven capabilities.

At ONUG Fall 2014, each of these three working groups generated white papers that included six architectural design models mapped to uses cases with top 10 requirements. The current testing program is the crucial second step toward validating market solutions against these ten requirements for each of the three groups.

Three additional working groups were formed in January 2015 to round out the broader SDN deployment across the enterprise. The new groups include: Network State Collection, Correlation, and Analytics; Common Management Tools across Network, Storage, and Compute; and Traffic Monitoring/Visibility.

For more information about NEC's SDN solutions, visit www.necam.com/sdn. To see the full, official testing report, visit http://opennetworkingusergroup.com/spring-2015-downloads/

NEC information: www.necam.com

Blog: www.NECToday.com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/nec-corporation-of-america

YouTube: www.youtube.com/interactiveNEC

Facebook (News - Alert) fan page: www.necam.com/facebook

Twitter (News - Alert): @NEC

For more on ONUG, go to www.OpenNetworkingUserGroup.com or follow us on Twitter @ONUG_

© 2015 NEC Corporation of America. NEC is a registered trademark of NEC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Other product or service marks mentioned are the trademarks of their respective owners.


[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]