Telecommunications company Telefónica and networking solutions company Brocade have joined forces to establish new benchmarks for the deployment and performance of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) solutions.

The pairing said consistent results from testing have provided clear evidence that will fundamentally alter the performance range service providers can expect from virtualize, software-based networking infrastructure.

The establishment of NFV benchmarks is part of a joint effort by both companies within the Telefónica NFV Reference Lab framework.

In the tests performed by Telefónica, the Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouter achieved 80 Gbps on a Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Intel-based x86 server.

Deployed within a Red Hat KVM environment, the Brocade Vyatta 5600 was deployed as a single Virtual Machine (VM) and supported all of the server’s available ports at line rate.

Telefónica’s head of NFV reference lab Francisco-Javier Ramón said “in less than two hours, we deployed the Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouter from a memory stick and completed our performance tests in our NFV Reference Lab.”

“These results are allowing us, as network operators, to aggressively change our perspective regarding what is possible with software-driven networking in order to accelerate the adoption and deployment of these revolutionary technologies,” Ramón said.

In addition to Brocade vPlane technology, the Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouter takes advantage of Intel Xeon processor-based servers and the Intel Data Plane Development Kit to achieve the performance required by the world’s largest telecommunication and service providers.

The Brocade Vyatta 5600 was released in early 2014, and Brocade claims it is the first purpose-built NFV solution to address the demands of the world’s largest service providers.

Brocade said it is committed to NFV and accelerating its rollout within carrier networks.

Brocade said its Vyatta 5600 vRouter will further advance the NFV solution’s capabilities.

Among the range of new features are:
- Layer 3 MPLS

- Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol Version 3 (L2TPv3)

- High-availability enhancements to support IPv6

- OpenDaylight integration through NETCONF/YANG

Brocade said its Vyatta 5600 vRouter is expected to be available in early 2015.