Brain4Net announces VNF certification program for B4N Service Platform compliant virtualized network functions. The initiative will allow software developers to expand market share by providing solutions to telecom operators, cloud service providers, and enterprises through attractive NaaS model.
B4N Service Platform, a Brain4Net flagship product, is an SDN & NFV based comprehensive network orchestration and service delivery software platform, which is a core element in groundbreaking solutions for telecom operators, cloud service providers, and enterprises. Fully ETSI MANO compliant NFV-part of the platform significantly streamlines VNF onboarding into clients network infrastructure.
The key advantage of B4N Service Platform is the ability to manage virtualized and physical infrastructure, enabling users to end-to-end services, steering L2 traffic from the client directly to the network function. This approach allows users to deliver a new service to a client within a few minutes.
Considering MANO requirements, Brain4Net developed a VNF manager, drivers for integration between B4N Service Platform and OpenStack API, user-friendly service configurator and ETSI-compliant network services templates. By using network services configurator, the administrator on the client side is able to easily create complex services in a template format and apply it to a specific tenant. The service templates represent service chains, including VNFs connected in different ways like Point-to-Point, Point-to-Multipoint, and Multipoint-to-Multipoint. This approach allows users to gain the maximum level of compute infrastructure abstraction and provide the appropriate level of flexibility in creation of providers’ service portfolio.
Brain4Net is currently working on integrating a broad list of VNF’s with the B4N Service Platform, including applications for:
- Traffic routing;
- Firewall;
- IPS/IDS;
- DPI;
- DLP;
- Anti-DDOS;
- BRAS;
- WAN-optimization.
By accepting the initiative software vendors gain an advantage of testing their applications in a near to real CSP infrastructure environment and use the program certificate as a true competitive differentiator.
“Broad partner ecosystem is one of the core values of our company”, said Oleg Schapov, CEO of Brain4Net. “We are interested in recruiting new, promising partners with highly demanded network solutions. The certification program is aimed at testing partner technologies in a modern environment and to offer the market not only the next generation network infrastructure solution. This also provides the possibility of adding compliant VNFs and managing them through user-friendly tools in a plug-and-play manner.”
The following VNFs passed certification tests in March 2017:
- VyOS, an open source network operating system that can be installed on physical hardware or a virtual machine on your server, or a cloud platform . It is based on GNU/Linux and joins multiple applications such as Quagga, ISC DHCPD, OpenVPN, StrongS/WAN and others under a single management interface;
- pfSense, network firewall distribution, based on the FreeBSD operating system with a custom kernel, and including third party free software packages for additional functionality. The pfSense software, with the help of the package system, is able to provide the same functionality or more of common commercial firewalls, without any of the artificial limitations.
To initiate the testing process VNF vendors need to fill in the form on the Brain4Net web-site. Once completed, a certification specialist will contact them shortly to arrange the dates of challenge. After successful passing, the certification for the VNF will be included in a catalogue of Brain4Net recommended services.