Open Networking Foundation testing labs increase to six in one year

PALO ALTO, USA: The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN) announced that the ONF OpenFlow Conformance Testing Program has welcomed six testing labs and established the ONF Testing Leadership Council (TLC) since its inception one year ago.

In addition to its four previously announced testing labs, the China Telecommunication Technology Labs (CTTL), hosted by the China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR) of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) in Beijing, and the Network Benchmarking Lab (NBL), co-hosted by the National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan, are now ONF-accredited labs for testing conformance to the OpenFlow specification.

"The traction received in the first year of the program validates ONF's responsibility to cultivate an open ecosystem of independent labs around the world that could perform conformance, benchmarking, and interoperability testing," said Rick Bauer, technical program manager of the Open Networking Foundation.

"Vendors with certified products solidify their commitment to the OpenFlow specification; benefit from condensed development cycles, expedited product deployment, and increased opportunities for testing protocols; and ensure their solutions are interoperable once they reach the end user. The program is a real service to network operators in building their confidence in the products they buy."

An ONF Certificate of Conformance is the highest level of assurance available in the market today and validates conformance to a particular version of the OpenFlow specification. Vendors can earn an ONF Certificate of Conformance for networking hardware, including switches and routers, as well as network software.

In the past year, ONF has selected six labs worldwide that are approved for OpenFlow conformance testing by virtue of their having met specific objective criteria. In addition to CTTL (CATR) and NBL, the following are ONF-accredited testing facilities:

- Beijing Internet Institute (BII)

- Criterion Network Labs (CNLabs)

- Indiana Center for Network Translational Research and Education (InCNTRE) at Indiana University

- University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL)

The program has accredited three member companies with OpenFlow v1.0 conformance for their solutions including Digital China Networks (DCN), Meru Networks, and NEC. ONF has nearly completed the conformance testing specification for OpenFlow 1.3 and has begun preliminary testing for OpenFlow 1.3 with a dozen member companies already involved in the process.