Keysight intros NFV benchmarking solution

July 18, 2019
Keysight Technologies (NYSE:KEYS) announced Cloud Peak, a solution to help service providers accelerate network functions virtualization (NFV) deployment with NFV ...

Keysight Technologies (NYSE:KEYS) announced Cloud Peak, a solution to help service providers accelerate network functions virtualization (NFV) deployment with NFV infrastructure (NFVi) performance testing and benchmarking.

As service providers launch 5G and business services, they look to adopt software defined networks (SDN) and NFV to ensure agility for services deployment, as well as a cost-effective network infrastructure.

"NFVi adds a new layer of complexity, yet it enables service providers to accelerate NFV deployment and realize its business benefits," said Sunil Kalidindi, vice president of product management for Keysight's Ixia Solutions Group. "With NFVi, the burden of system-level testing shifts from the network equipment provider to the service provider who needs to integrate the virtual network functions with their own customized server infrastructure. Cloud Peak enables the service provider to characterize the infrastructure to understand what it can handle, how to improve it, and if it is reaching its capacity."

Cloud Peak combines Ixia's test capabilities and expertise in validating NFV throughout the continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, including disaggregated fabric benchmarking, NFVi characterization, service-chain and virtual network functions (VNF) validation and onboarding.

Cloud Peak features include:

  • Simplified NFVi benchmarking via a web-based automation solution
  • An Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) that integrates the OPNFV Yardstick framework for infrastructure compliance
  • Workloads that scale from testing a single server to a datacenter
  • Analytics that provide reporting and real-time dashboards

Cloud Peak is designed to help users understand the capabilities and performance of an infrastructure under varied conditions, to evaluate design tradeoffs, upgrades and component swaps, and to identify performance bottlenecks. Cloud Peak's first release focuses on VMware vCenter and OpenStack.