Telefonica, Brocade benchmark NFV deployment and performance
Service provider Telefónica (NYSE: TEF) and Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) say they have combined to create benchmarks for the deployment and performance of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) enablers. The benchmarks, that the partners assert will significantly change service provider expectations for virtualized, software-based network performance, are the result of testing the companies performed within the Telefónica NFV Reference Lab framework.
The tests leveraged Brocade’s Vyatta 5600 vRouter, which achieved 80 Gbps on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Intel-based x86 server. Deployed within a Red Hat KVM environment, the Brocade Vyatta 5600 was deployed as a single virtual machine (VM) and supported all of the server's available ports at line rate, the companies say.
"The promise of NFV is rapid service creation and highly elastic scalability. While virtualization is significant to achieving this agility, it has historically been the fundamental limiter to the kind of performance required for scalability," said Enrique Algaba, network innovation and virtualization director at Telefónica.
"In less than two hours, we deployed the Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouter from a memory stick and completed our performance tests in our NFV Reference Lab. These results are allowing us, as network operators, to aggressively change our perspective regarding what is possible with software-driven networking in order to accelerate the adoption and deployment of these revolutionary technologies," added Francisco-Javier Ramón, head of Telefónica NFV Reference Lab.
Brocade released the Vyatta 5600 in early 2014 as a purpose-built NFV platform designed to offer advanced routing, firewall, and VPN functionality. A new capabilities release, slated for early next year, will further extend the platform’s abilities to support NFV capabilities in carrier networks to include:
- Layer 3 MPLS
- Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol Version 3 (L2TPv3)
- High-availability enhancements to support IPv6
- OpenDaylight integration through NETCONF/YANG.
Telefónica has been aggressive in its investigation of software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV. This includes collaboration with several optical transport vendors (see "Huawei, Telefonica trial SDN-based IP and optical layer interworking,""Telefonica I+D, Infinera demo SDN-based Network-as-a-Service capabilities," and "NFV architecture target of Telefónica, Cyan, Red Hat partnership").
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