Global Conformance Testing Program Continues Expansion with Addition of Seventh Testing Lab
PALO ALTO, Calif., September 8, 2015 – The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced the availability of the OpenFlow® v1.3 testing specification. ONF also announced the addition of its seventh authorized testing facility, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in South Korea. With the release of the testing specification for OpenFlow v1.3, any organization can test its products for OpenFlow conformance at an accredited ONF testing lab.
OpenFlow v1.3 includes features critical to the development of richly functional SDN products and services. This latest conformance specification allows companies to leverage a standard that ensures the mandatory components of the protocol are included within products. This further ensures that companies are able to build OpenFlow-based products, including hardware switches, that implement an important set of OpenFlow features beyond those available in OpenFlow v1.0.
“OpenFlow is a component vital to SDN’s acceleration and deployment worldwide and is increasingly being demanded by network operators,” said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. “OpenFlow plays a key role in SDN as an architecture, a model, and an interface. Operators are also demanding interoperability and conformance to the standard, and this specification helps achieve exactly that.”
ONF and its Testing and Interoperability Working Group introduced the OpenFlow Conformance Testing Program in 2013. 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 – both ONF member companies and those not affiliated with ONF – can earn an ONF Certificate of Conformance for networking hardware, including switches and routers, as well as network software by testing their solution at an accredited ONF testing lab. With the addition of ETRI, the ONF OpenFlow Conformance Testing Program has seven accredited international testing laboratories, including: Beijing Internet Institute (BII) in Beijing; China Telecommunication Technology Labs (CTTL) in Beijing; Criterion Network Labs (CNLabs) in Bangalore; Indiana Center for Network Translational Research and Education (InCNTRE) at Indiana University; Network Benchmarking Lab (NBL) of National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Hsinchu, Taiwan; and the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL) at the University of New Hampshire.
“The OpenFlow Conformance Testing Program provides checks and balances to ensure vendors’ products are OpenFlow compliant and increases interoperability with other network architecture components,” said Erica Johnson, director of the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL) and chair of the Open Networking Foundation’s Testing Leadership Council. “Vendors who certify their OpenFlow products are able to show end users their long-term commitment to the protocol standard within their product lines and their commitment for the future of networking. We are encouraged by the commitment many companies have made to the OpenFlow protocol and look forward to accelerating the adoption of open SDN.”
For more information about the ONF OpenFlow Conformance Testing Program, please visit https://opennetworking.org/certification/product.
About ONF
Launched in 2011 by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo!, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a growing nonprofit organization with more than 140 members whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of open SDN. ONF promotes open SDN and OpenFlow technologies and standards while fostering a vibrant market of products, services, applications, customers, and users. For further details visit the ONF website at: https://opennetworking.org.
