Tungsten Fabric Launches Performance Lab to Drive Edge-cloud Ecosystem Growth

Shanghai (KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China) — Nov. 13, 2018 –The LF Networking Fund (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across networking projects, today announced the new Tungsten Fabric Performance Lab. Launched jointly by Intel, Juniper Networks, Lenovo and SDNLAB, the Performance Lab aims to forge an open source test and verification environment for Tungsten Fabric and other Software Defined Networks (SDN) projects.

Tungsten Fabric is an open source, scalable, multi-cloud, multistack networking platform. It provides a single point of control, observability and analytics for networking and security. Tungsten Fabric is integrated with private cloud stacks including Kubernetes, VMware and OpenStack. It also supports hybrid deployments with public clouds including AWS and GCE.

“Continuous integration and automated testing are critical pieces for any environment supporting edge use cases, especially in highly distributed production environments,” said Randy Bias, vice president, Technology – Open Source Software at Juniper Networks. “When you consider the diversity of vendors and use cases in edge, the testing and integration problem is even more acute. Tungsten Fabric Performance Lab will provide the infrastructure and tooling that both vendors and users need to deliver reliable and performant applications and network services, from the core to the edge.”

The goal of the Tungsten Fabric Performance Lab is to build a Continuous Integration (CI) and automatic test environment for Tungsten Fabric functional and performance indicators, including key usage scenarios such as edge computing, multiple cloud and switch integration. By working collaboratively with software and hardware partners across the ecosystem to define the key service scheme, the goal is to help accelerate commercial deployments.

Hosted by LFN Associate member SDNLAB, the lab is based in in Nanjing, China, and will be integrated as Tungsten Fabric Lab infrastructure. This joins other Linux Foundation open labs in the region,  including OPNFV Pharos Labs in Shanghai, Xi’an, and Beijing (hosted by China Mobile, Huawei, and ZTE). Linux Foundation’s Data Dlane Development Kit (DPDK), the Intel® Select Solution for NFVI based Lenovo ThinkSystem servers will be seamlessly integrated into Tungsten Fabric’s CI to support Tungsten Fabric’s bare-metal, SmartNIC performance testing.

SDNLAB is a leading independent digital service platform in China providing the daily news, technology analysis, industry insights, lab and education content service for networking and Information technology.  SDNLAB is part of FNII (Future Network Innovation Institute), a joint research institute granted with state fund, deep collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and leading universities such as Tsinghua University and BUPT, CETC.

Any interested parties are cordially invited to participate in the Tungsten Fabric Performance Lab to help enhance a broad ecosystem. More details on how to participate are available at https://wiki.tungsten.io/display/TUN/Open+Lab

The Tungsten Fabric community will host community events onsite at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China, November 13, and  KubeCon + CloudNative Con North America, December 10. Join us to learn about the project and how the community is preparing for some exciting edge computing use cases.  

Supporting Quotes:

The head of SDNLAB, Dr. Wei Liang said, “SDNLAB is a leading research institute focused on innovative future network technology. We are delighted to contribute to the Linux Foundation’s open source efforts as this will extend our academy’s research strategy to connect directly with leading industry leading projects; the synergy will lead to turning  more innovative ideas into reality, via open source.”

Rajesh Gadiyar, Vice President and CTO of Intel’s Network Platforms Group (NPG) said, “Intel is pleased to support this initiative, which will help drive faster innovation and adoption of Tungsten Fabric for a variety of use cases such as 5G and edge computing.  By optimizing data throughput with the Intel® Select Solution for NFVI from Lenovo and the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), Tungsten Fabric’s vRouter provides a high performance, production ready virtualized solution that connects a customer’s application implemented with containers, virtual machines, and bare-metal environments.

Randy Bias, vice president, Technology, Open Source Software at Juniper Networks, said, “Enterprises are realizing that ‘easy-to-deploy’ can lead to ‘uh-oh’ moments when the time comes to scale out multi-cloud networking technology. The Tungsten Fabric community has made a commitment to delivering the tooling and services that make deploying this technology more straightforward and less time consuming. Launching the Tungsten Fabric Performance Lab is an important step in achieving that goal.”

“Lenovo is very excited to be a key participant in the launch of Tungsten Fabric Performance Lab, which will enable the ecosystem of vendors and users to validate interoperability, performance and scalability for real world deployment scenarios, like hybrid cloud and 5G, and will accelerate the adoption of Tungsten Fabric,” said Ahmed Murad, director of Product Management, Networking and Telco at Lenovo Data Center Group. “Through this test lab, customers will be able to conduct interoperability testing to accelerate and ensure the success of future deployments of these technologies.”

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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