NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Dec 7, 2016) - The New IP Agency (NIA), the not-for-profit independent initiative that provides information, education, analysis, community services and testing to support and accelerate the development of a global economy based on open, advanced, virtualized IP networks, today released a report on multi-vendor interoperability. The new report comes out as virtualized IP networking solutions evolve and issues of OpenStack variations and security emerge.

More than 30 solutions from 23 vendor companies, including Cisco, Huawei, Juniper and Nokia, have been tested by the NIA and its testing partner, EANTC, since the NIA launched in early 2016. The new report provides a recap of the NIA's evaluations covering VNFs, NFVIs and Service Chaining held by the NIA throughout 2016, in addition to several new vendor combinations with Dell EMC, Fortinet, Huawei, Infoblox, Mitel, Nokia, Procera, Nokia and ZTE that were hosted as part of the NIA's VNF and NFVI evaluation.

Comparing the results of evaluations hosted earlier in the year, the report notes interoperability success rates have improved gradually; however, the communications industry is still in the early stages of developing and deploying virtualized IP solutions and work still remains. As earlier NIA reports have noted, the issue of various versions of OpenStack implementations continues to be one of the communication industry's challenges.

"Having tested more than 50 NFVI-VNF combinations on behalf of the NIA throughout this year, EANTC confirms successful interworking in more than two thirds of all test runs. OpenStack interfaces are the basis for this industry, which helps to create a common understanding of procedures and language," says Carsten Rossenhoevel, EANTC's managing director. "Getting multi-vendor combinations up and running is sometimes time-consuming, as expected; we disclose success as well as challenges transparently in the public test report for the benefit of service providers, vendors and open source projects."

Additionally, while not yet the focus of the NIA's interoperability evaluations, the report hints at looming security challenges as vendor security policies vary and visibility into NFVI features and configurations are needed.

Tackling the need for broader industry collaboration in order to improve interoperability amongst various vendors' next-generation virtualized IP networking solutions, the NIA hosts periodic interoperability evaluations with its membership base. These evaluations focus on the very same real-world interoperability challenges faced by communication service providers (CSPs) seeking to migrate their networks from legacy systems to more future-proof, virtualized -- or software-based -- networks that decouple network functions from hardware. To CSPs, the work of the NIA assists their efforts to use many of the principles of cloud computing in order to manage networks and deliver new services to end users.

The test campaigns covering NFV orchestration and VNF manager to VIM interoperability will continue for the first quarter 2017. They will be followed by a multi-vendor SDN and NFV integration test in the second quarter.

The NIA's most recent report on VNF and NFVI interoperability can be found here: http://www.lightreading.com/nfv/nfv-tests-and-trials/2016-nia-eantc-nfv-interoperability-test-report/d/d-id/728802 in addition to the NIA's previously published reports on VNF, NFVI and Service Chaining.

About the New IP Agency

The New IP Agency (NIA) (www.newipagency.com) is a not-for-profit 501(c)(6) (pending IRS approval) independent initiative providing information, education, analysis, community services and testing to support and accelerate the development of a global economy based on open, advanced, virtualized IP networks.

For more information about the New IP Agency and how to join, please contact Jeff Hannah at hannah@newipagency.com. Follow NIA on Twitter @The_New_IP or visit http://www.NewIPAgency.com.

About EANTC

EANTC (European Advanced Networking Test Center) is internationally recognized as one of the world's leading independent test centers for telecommunication technologies. Based in Berlin, Germany, the company offers vendor-neutral consultancy and realistic, reproducible high-quality testing services since 1991. Customers include leading network equipment manufacturers, tier-1 service providers, large enterprises and governments worldwide. EANTC's proof of concept, acceptance tests and network audits cover established and next-generation fixed and mobile network technologies. Visit http://www.eantc.com.