ONF Broadening Testing Program to Grow the OpenFlow® Ecosystem
PALO ALTO, Calif., November 13, 2014 – The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced it has extended the ONF OpenFlow® Conformance Testing Program to include testing for non-ONF members. Companies interested in receiving an OpenFlow® Certificate of Conformance for their solution, regardless of ONF membership, are entitled to use the OpenFlow-conformant logo and assert their product’s conformance with the respective version of the OpenFlow® specification upon successful completion of the program.
“Having a diverse ecosystem of SDN-certified products reinforces the market’s confidence in the OpenFlow® standard,” 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. “Extending the OpenFlow® Conformance Testing Program to non-members furthers the open SDN ecosystem, leading to broader commercialization and adoption of the standard.”
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, upon completing the necessary testing regimen with one of the ONF-accredited independent testing laboratories. All companies, members and non-members, who pass ONF conformance testing will have their conformant products listed on the ONF website.
“The ONF testing program has seen great traction in the past year within our membership, and we’ve determined it is time to open the program up to non-members as well,” said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. “Through the expansion of this program, end users will have additional assurance that the products they purchase from vendors, regardless of ONF membership, are OpenFlow® conformant, strengthening the validity of the open SDN movement while also fostering the OpenFlow® ecosystem. We are particularly excited to welcome the ODMs (original design manufacturers) to this program, which now fits their business model more closely.”
Companies interested in testing their products for OpenFlow® conformance can contract with an ONF-approved testing laboratory and purchase conformance testing services independent of ONF. The ONF OpenFlow® Conformance Testing Program has six accredited international testing laboratories, namely 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 University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL) at the University of New Hampshire.
For more information on ONF’s OpenFlow® Conformance Testing Program, please visit https://opennetworking.org/sdn-resources/onf-specifications/openflow-conformance.
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.
