ONF’s Executive Director, Dan Pitt shares a recap of the third PlugFest event held at Indiana University.
Kicking off the summer, nearly 50 network engineers from 20 member companies worldwide traveled to Indiana University on June 3 to attend the Open Networking Foundation’s (ONF) PlugFest. Graciously hosted for a second time at Indiana University’s InCNTRE, the first ONF certified lab for conformance testing, ONF member companies collaborated for one full week with common goals of refining the protocol, providing end users with interoperable products, and increasing the commercialization and adoption of Software-Defined Networking and the OpenFlow® protocol.
During the event, vendor companies worked in a neutral environment to test new software features and products that have not yet been tested for interoperability among other vendors’ software and hardware products. Innovative and successful implementations of OpenFlow® versions 1.0, 1.2, and 1.3 were tested in commercial and test controllers, as well as hardware and virtual switches. After a week of testing, ONF member companies were able to resolve features and interoperability issues with different vendors to ensure efficiency before being commercially applied to service providers, data centers, and enterprise networks.
The addition of OpenFlow® version 1.3 was a significant highlight of this event as we saw more than 90 percent of members participate in this testing. For the past few months we encouraged our member companies to implement OpenFlow® 1.3 as it addresses complex network behavior, optimizes performance, and enables a richer set of capabilities; it was great to see our words were heard with this impressive turnout. For additional highlights and member testimonials of the third PlugFest, please see our recent announcement.
As we look forward to the next PlugFest event in November, I welcome member companies who have not yet participated to attend. Participants can accomplish an equivalent of two months of quality assurance (QA) testing in about a week and complete unique testing that could take multiple months in a QA lab, as our Testing & Interoperability Working Group Chairman, Michael Haugh, has stated. Most importantly, these tests move us forward to achieve a multi-vendor SDN ecosystem and allow us to provide greater benefits. Will you join us in our movement?
-Dan Pitt, Executive Director
Acknowledgement: A special thank you to InCNTRE SDN lab, Chairman Michael Haugh and Ron Milford, co-chair of the Interoperability and Testing Working Group for organizing and hosting the event, as well as all the member companies who participated and contributed a quote for our recent release.
