ONF announces that initial OpenFlow® v1.3 conformance testing has begun.
It’s been nearly a year since we announced the OpenFlow® Conformance Testing Program, designed to give networking vendors an opportunity to demonstrate compliance with the OpenFlow® specification. Today, we are excited to announce that we are expanding this program to include conformance testing for OpenFlow® v1.3. Move over, George. Our royal baby has a sibling!
We’ve seen increasing market attraction to OpenFlow® v1.3 over the course of the year, and this growing interest has been gratifying to everyone involved. The companies actively involved in our early testing act as vanguards for the development and adoption of SDN, as testing establishes greater trust and integrity in the OpenFlow® protocol standard.
At our most recent PlugFest, the availability of OpenFlow® v1.3 testing was met with great excitement. This was our first global PlugFest, co-located at the Beijing Internet Institute (BII) in China and the Indiana Center for Network Translational Research and Education (InCNTRE) at Indiana University, and it took place May 12-16. Like the Hunger Games, we have six member companies happily volunteering as “tributes” in our early-adopter testing of OpenFlow® v1.3. While the Hunger Games awarded only one “victor,” our testing program is designed to encourage multiple “winners,” or in our case vendors. Those who pass the test will be able to bring OpenFlow® v1.3 compliant products to end users.
What makes testing better? Use cases! And boy do we have them – over 800 to be exact! These real-world examples help in the testing process to ensure that the OpenFlow® specification will work effectively in actual situations by end users in various environments.
Testing for OpenFlow® v1.3 will take place at the four ONF-approved testing labs: BII, Criterion Network Labs (CNLabs), InCNTRE, and the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL).
The OpenFlow® v1.3 testing specification will be released via an open source document in the coming months. Let the testing begin, and may the odds be ever in your favor!
- Rick Bauer, Technical Program Manager, ONF
