DZS successfully participated in the 6th NFV&MEC Remote API Plugtests from February 1 – 28, 2021. This event provided us a great opportunity to test the stability, durability and quality of DZS Cloud End-to-End Orchestration and Automation (E2EO), based on RIFT.ware, against an external entity. As a result of the challenges created by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this Plugtest was smaller than past events. Despite these challenges, approximately 25 vendors from different areas of the NFV ecosystems (OSS/BSS, NFVO, VNFM, VNF, CNF and VIM) participated in the testing. In addition, several telecommunications companies observed and supervised the activities.
RIFT, recently acquired by DZS, has participated in this event since the first Plugtest and we were happy to attend another event. This year the participants primarily focused on testing solutions from different vendors to identify if they are following the ETSI standards. ETSI provided a Test Automation Platform (TAP) also known as ETSI Robot Framework. The TAP test allowed vendors to pick the relevant test suites and cross-check if their solutions followed the respective ETSI standards APIs. We tested our DZS E2EO NVFO and VNFM SOL005 and SOL003 APIs against the Robot Framework. DZS typically uses SOL005 APIs for Northbound integration with OSS/BSS and SOL003 APIs for Southbound integration with an external VNFM. During this testing, we ensured that DZS Cloud E2EO supports and adheres to the ETSI API standards for SOL003 and SOL005 compliance.
This year’s Plugtest also included participation from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) community. The attendees at this event demonstrated that the number of VNF solutions are drastically diminishing while the number of CNF solutions continues to increase. The ecosystem is aggressively migrating towards containerizing their solutions and the involvement of the CNCF provided guidance to all CNF vendors to revamp their existing solutions so that they can adhere to the best cloud native principles.
Due to the current pandemic, ETSI moved the exciting cross-vendor interoperability event to October 2021 so that it can be held onsite at the ESTI headquarters in Sophia Antipolis, France. However, DZS was still able to test DZS Cloud E2EO outside our organization at the Plugtest in February and we experienced very limited product related issue at the event. DZS continues to improve the robustness and maturity of DZS Cloud E2EO year-after-year and we are looking forward to the next Plugtest.
Please note that on March 4, 2021 DZS acquired RIFT, inc. and rebranded RIFT.ware Orchestration to DZS Cloud E2EO. RIFT.ware is now the platform basis for DZS Cloud E2EO, and 5G Slice Management And NFV Orchestration are now feature packs within the DZS Cloud portfolio. Click here to learn more about the DZS acquisition of RIFT.
For more information about the testing that occurs at ETSI Plugtests, click here.
For more details on the NFV&MEC Plugtest 2021, click here.
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- RIFT’s Robust RIFT.ware Flourishes at NFV&MEC Plugtest 2020
