ADVA recently announced that several of its demarcation technology and synchronization equipment products passed interoperability testing conducted by the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC). The results are good news for ADVA as the NFV and SDN markets continue the march away from proprietary systems and towards standardization.
ADVA Optical Networking is based in Norcross, Georgia, and provides optical transport, carrier Ethernet, network virtualization, synchronization, and network management automation. The EANTC is a Berlin-based tech center that seeks to provide objective performance, interoperability and conformance testing.
EANTC has played a major role in interoperability testing as it relates to NFV technology. Twelve vendors including big names like Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, and Juniper were involved in an operation that was the first multi-vendor testing to be conducted by an independent entity.
A total of 39 interoperability tests were conducted, with a total of 25 passing EANTC’s strict requirements. With a pass rate of 64 percent it’s clear that interoperability across the industry is not quite there yet.
The products tested were the FSP 150, OSA 5401, and OSA 5421. The FSP 150 is a demarcation unit designed to provide first-mile Ethernet access. It can be used to set up an environment with multiple-rate Ethernet. The OSP 5401 and 5421 are clock devices that provide synchronization.
The successful results from EANTC’s interop tests of the three ADVA devices are great news for the company, because that’s the direction that the SDN/NFV world is headed towards.
Interoperability is critical in first responder networks that allow public safety agencies to communicate with each other. It has also become important in the healthcare industry, where sharing patient information facilitates better treatment.
Service providers like interoperability because it means they aren’t married to a particular vendor. This gives them flexibility to choose components from different vendors when expanding or upgrading their network.
The way it stands now, the industry is on the right track when it comes to interoperability, but still has a ways to go before meeting that goal.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
