Spirent puts SDN/OpenFlow performance and scale to the test

Spirent Communications has teamed with members of the SDN/OpenFlow ecosystem to validate the scale and performance of an OpenFlow infrastructure. Live demonstrations will be conducted at the ONF SDN Solution Showcase during the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, October 14 – 17 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Spirent will be testing the readiness of SDN/OpenFlow topologies to see if they can deliver the scale needed to confidently deploy SDN based services without risking the Quality of Service (QoS) of the network or Quality of Experience (QoE) for end users.

“Software-defined networking simplifies network management, improves quality of service and offers unprecedented agility to manage and turn-up new services,” said Neil Holmquist, Senior Director of Product Marketing and Management for Cloud and IP Solutions at Spirent Communications. “However, it introduces vulnerability with a single centralized controller, and the new virtual switches make network managers uneasy about going live with SDN without testing at full scale with heavy traffic. To validate the readiness of SDN controllers and switches to support real-world scale needed by end-users, Spirent is leading the way in realistic high performance, high scale testing in several ONF test beds.”

Spirent is partnering with Real Status to emulate the SDN switches in order to test the scale and performance of the SDN controller and provide a highly scalable, multidimensional, 360-degree visualization of the network topology and performance status. Using Spirent TestCenter and the Real Status Hyperglance management tool, the test measures the controllers ability to scale while easily identifying the congested links. Spirent and Real Status have teamed up to provide the necessary massive scale and realistic testing of cloud level traffic via OpenFlow switches. This will provide the ability to easily visualize, monitor, and tune how the network infrastructure performs at full scale, in real-time, prior to deploying in production.

Spirent is also joining forces with Netronome and Advantech to demonstrate OpenFlow’s ability to work at high rates and capacity. With Spirent’s OpenFlow Controller Emulation and East/West traffic generation, we will show how the FlowNic from Netronome will aide in Flow Capacity and Performance of the Advantech OpenFlow switch. Spirent TestCenter will be used to simulate the demanding traffic patterns of a large-scale SDN network while pushing a large volume of flows to the switches flow-table.