Software Defined Networking Gets Tested

The newly minted SDN Testing Consortium backed by InCNTRE(The Indiana Center for Network Translational Research and Education) is now leading an effort to accelerate SDN testing and interoperability. Among InCNTRE’s partners is testing vendor Ixia, which is also helping to lead the Open Networking Foundation’s testing and interoperability working group. Indiana University has emerged in recent years as a leading research basis and user of SDN.

As part of the overall effort to bring SDN implementations and vendors together for interoperability, the SDN Testing Consortium is kicking off a program to certify OpenFlow on switches. The testing is now seeking to confirm full compliance with the OpenFlow protocol but rather just a form of conformance.

“Compliance has legal ramifications and if you’re achieving compliance there are other liabilities that come into play,” Mike Haugh, senior market development manager at Ixia told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. “With conformance, you break down the specification into individual test cases that verify each line item of a standard and then classify if it’s a must-have or just a should-have item.”

Haugh added items that are considered as ‘should’ or ‘may’ include items aren’t required for conformance, only the ‘must’ items are required.

Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
SDN Gets Conformance Testing

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.