Mirantis Launches Individualized VNF Certification Program Based on Validated Reference Architectures for Telcos

New approach tackles the complex realities of actual customer NFV infrastructure and customer-specific business objectives

OPENSTACK SUMMIT, VANCOUVER, Canada – May 21, 2018 – Today at the OpenStack Summit, Mirantis announced a new VNF certification program that centers around providing communication service providers (CSPs) with validated solutions on Mirantis Cloud Platform that can be more readily deployed by CSPs for production services.

The program has been developed with VNF partners and carriers to deliver a more tailored, customer-specific validation matching customers’ specific business objectives to their NFV infrastructure (NFVI).

To date, most OpenStack VNF certification programs simply focus on demonstrating that a VNF can be on-boarded within a lab environment without addressing any of the carrier’s requirements for production deployments. Because all NFVI environments differ customer to customer, Mirantis has upgraded their certification program to create a far more individualized VNF validation program which consists of a 3-way effort between Mirantis, telco customers and VNF vendors.

The outcome is a validated reference architecture that addresses customers’ specific throughput and latency goals, network chaining architectures, physical network and compute infrastructure targeted to particular business use cases.

“Over the years, we certified dozens of VNFs, but as customers started on-boarding some of those ‘certified VNFs,’ we realized they needed individualized verification,” said Adrian Ionel, co-founder and CEO, Mirantis. “So, we are evolving our generic VNF certification program in favor of a VNF validation approach that tests VNFs against the actual customer NFVI, taking into account customer-specific business objectives.”

The Mirantis VNF Validation process leverages the DriveTrain lifecycle management toolchain inside Mirantis Cloud Platform to provide the industry’s most customer-tailored, customizable and repeatable approach to validating cloud deployments. The process:

• Identifies and assesses the best VNF for the business needs

• Provides an automated and repeatable test and validation process

• Performs the required tests as often as necessary

• Supports a dynamic, agile and repeatable deployment environment

• Provides clear reporting and data at all stages of the program

• Prepares VNFs for consumption by production orchestration solutions

Metaswitch’s Perimeta, the market leading virtualized Session Border Controller (vSBC), is one of the first solutions to be validated within Mirantis’ VNF reference architectures.

“As a leader in virtualized, cloud native communication software, Metaswitch was pleased to validate our VNFs on the MCP reference architecture for OpenStack,” said Mark Price, VP Ecosystem Solutions Development, Metaswitch. “This approach simplifies the deployment and verification of our vSBC on OpenStack and provides recommended default configurations for interconnect solutions.”

A complete description of the process can be found here.