Interdynamix (IDX) has been known as an advanced, high end technology solution provider and technology infrastructure integrator for 20+ years. They have helped hundreds of clients deliver some of the most innovative and sophisticated technology solutions to successfully power their businesses. Most recently, IDX has initiated an NFV project at CENGN to create and execute scalability testing for their new VNF onboarding techniques. To implement and define their testing framework, IDX will be deploying their NFV reference architecture on the CENGN Testbed.
The IDX Story – Keeping Up with the Procurement Process
IDX has been delivering customer-focused enterprise infrastructure solutions since 1995. Proving to be an extremely agile company, IDX has adapted to the world’s ever-changing technological waves and has continued to maintain and gain clients by providing high quality solutions.
Years ago, it was common for organizations to purchase complete end-to-end infrastructure solutions from a single provider resulting in the organization becoming locked in with a single vendor. The procurement process has changed drastically as organizations look to purchase the best individual pieces of the infrastructure and architect them together for optimal performance, something that requires deep software engineering knowledge. In addition, the growing popularity of integrating open source technology into an organization’s infrastructure has created increased configuration complexity.
In order to avoid long transition times, or errors due to the introduction of new pieces to an infrastructure, it is important to have validation techniques in place that are efficient ways to verify the functionality of on-boarded tools and equipment. IDX specializes in handling this complexity so their clients can get back to business. Currently, IDX provides solutions in the areas of SDN, NFV, OpenStack, cloud, IT infrastructure, among others.
VNF Onboarding
To bring their services to the next level, IDX has created an NFV framework based on the NFV standards of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and has successfully implemented solutions for their clients based on this framework. They’re currently in the process of developing a VNF onboarding capability that will provide cloud service providers (CSPs) with a service-based approach to the complex task of integrating and testing a VNF with their underlying infrastructure.
Scalability Testing
In their CENGN project, IDX will be testing how the performance metrics of their two pre-deployment VNF validation techniques vary as traffic from the CENGN Testbed is increased. The two validation techniques IDX will be concentrating on are VNF Data Plane Benchmarking and Dimensioning. Benchmarking will determine the level of performance that can be achieved by their particular VNF for a NFVi with fixed resources. Dimensioning will allow them to conclude the level of NFVi resources required to achieve a given level of performance for a VNF.
CENGN member Wind River will be a key resource for IDX throughout the duration of this project. Since IDX has clients hosted on their IDX lab they’re unable to run tests that could risk affecting service quality to their customers. By coming to CENGN and gaining admin access to CENGN’s resources, they have secure access to an entire Wind River Titanium Edge Cloud and its Servers. This provides IDX with a complete testing environment where they can intensify the traffic flow to be processed by their VNF Data Plane Benchmarking and Dimensioning techniques without worry of affecting their other projects.
Validating and testing the performance of a VNF is a highly specialized task due to the infrastructure requirements. By engaging in a project at CENGN, IDX will be provided the tools needed to strengthen its status as a world-class provider of NFV services and solutions. Stay tuned to learn the results of this ongoing project.