Recently, the Fall PlugFest 2014, jointly hosted and sponsored by Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and the SDN Certification and Testing Center (SDNCTC) of BII Group, has come to a successful end. This event of testing, by means of global transnational cooperation, was held simultaneously both in Beijing, China and the Silicon Valley, the U.S. This was another globally simultaneous testing of interoperability of SDN following the Spring Plugfest by China and the U.S. this May. 

Vendors attending the ONF Fall Plugfest

   This ONF Plugfest Interoperability Testing has attracted more than 20 SDN device and equipment vendors all across the world to the venue, including 11 companies--BII Group, Huawei, Spirent, IXIA,DCN, xNet, Greenet, ZTE, Pica8, H3C, EstiNet, who participated in the testing in Beijing of OpenFlow 1.3 conformity, interoperability, switches/controllers performance, vendor APP, interoperability between China and the U.S., data center, and integrated solutions to networking virtualization, OFConfig, and so forth.

The site of the Fall Plugfest Testing in Beijing

   In order to better proceed with the testing event, and upgrade the maturity of products from the vendors, Rick Bauer, the technical programs manager of ONF, Michael Haugh, chair of test and interoperability working group, made a special visit to the testing spot in Beijing to provide guidance and exchange ideas with the local engineers in the Asia-Pacific Region. 

   The fundamental testing goes steadily, and the OpenFlow 1.3 has matured, according to Michael Haugh, in summarizing this event.

   Rick Bauer commented that there had already been eight successful ONF Plugfest testing events, and this Fall Plugfest was the second transnational cooperation, which owes its success to BII’s dedicated support and BII’s industrial leadership in China’s SDN industry. In the future, Plugfest will accelerate the progress of the fundamental testing, and implement freer testing on a higher level. In 2015, there will be the “APPFest”, APP developpers will also be introduced to the testing event, and advance towards SDN north will be made, to enhance the joint construction of the triple-layer community of ONF, OpenDaylight, and OpenStack and accelerate the progress of SDN.

   As the host of the event, Li Zhen, SDNCTC director of BII Group, said that this event had 11 companies in the Asia-pacific region at the site, and that BII is now discussing the possibility of participation by non-member companies, hoping that there would be more vendors,and APP developpers engaged in the event, with concerted efforts and shared knowledge, to facilitate the SDN commercial deployment and promote technical standards.

   It is learnt that as far as this event is concerned, ONF will collaborate with the SDNCTC to jointly release the white paper of authoritative testing, to elaborate on and conduct comprehensive analysis of the content, cases, effects and so forth of the testing. Meanwhile, the China Future Network Development and Innovation Forum & Global SDN Open Networking Conference 2014 to be held in Nanjing on 8th and 9th December (www.chinasdn.org/2014) will be attended by Dan Pitt, the executive chair of ONF, and many other experts, who will analyze the testing event to promote the development of SDN technologies.