Ixia, a Business of Keysight Technologies, Helps Service Providers Accelerate NFV Deployment with NFVi Benchmarking Solution

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS), a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers and governments accelerate innovation and connect the world, announced Cloud Peak, a turnkey solution that helps service providers accelerate Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) deployments through rigorous NFV Infrastructure (NFVi) performance testing and benchmarking.

As service providers rush to launch 5G and commercial services, they are eager to adopt software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV to ensure agility in service deployment and cost-effective network infrastructure. According to IDC, NFVi will have a compound annual growth rate of 58.1% between 2017 and 2022.

"While NFVi introduces new complexities, it enables service providers to accelerate NFV deployments and realize business benefits," said Sunil Kalidindi, vice president of product management at Keysight's Ixia business. "With NFVi, the burden of system-level testing shifts from network equipment providers to service providers who need to integrate virtualized network functions with their own custom server infrastructure. Cloud Peak enables service providers to characterize their infrastructure to understand what services it can handle, how to optimize it, and whether it is reaching capacity."

Cloud Peak combines Ixia’s comprehensive testing capabilities and expertise in validating NFV throughout the entire continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, including decomposition architecture benchmarking, NFVi characterization, service chaining, and virtual network function (VNF) validation and go-live.

Cloud Peak brings the following key benefits to service providers:

• Simplify NFVi benchmarking with an easy-to-use, automated, web-based solution
• Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) integrates the powerful but complex OPNFV Yardstick framework for infrastructure compliance
• Scale from testing a single server to testing elastic workloads in a data center
• Powerful analytics with extensive reporting and real-time dashboards

Cloud Peak provides rigorous methodologies for understanding infrastructure functionality and performance under various scenarios, evaluating design tradeoffs, upgrades and component swaps to uncover performance bottlenecks. This enables service providers to size infrastructure required, evaluate and decide between vendors and technology approaches, and optimize infrastructure to run specific VNF workloads. The initial release of Cloud Peak is focused on VMware vCenter and OpenStack, the leading operator platforms for NFV and VMWare NFV infrastructure.