Red Hat will now offer a deeper, Virtualised Network Function (VNF) certification level in addition to its existing NFV certification offering. Partners who are a part of Red Hat Connect for Tech Partners can now access this; in addition those interested in adding a VNF certification to their NFV-certified solutions can visit the NFV Zone of Red Hat Connect to learn more.
The building blocks for NFV certification have been of keen interest to enterprises of all sizes spanning many phases of deployment with OpenStack, says Red Hat in a blog:“Over the past years, we have seen a wide variety of telecommunications providers entering the OpenStack space and building a more scalable infrastructure for their customers, from Huawei to Verizon”.
Even though VNF is already a building block in the setup of NFV (Network Function Virtualisation), there are inherent differences that many vendors may face while certifying their solutions in these areas. Previous NFV certifications typically focused on the API and did not address architectural and underlying infrastructure certification. With Red Hat’s new VNF certification process, this can now happen. Red Hat’s OpenStack certifications are expanding to verify that providers of virtual network functions are taking full advantage of the platform, creating a solid foundation for customer deployments.
Customers running NFV solutions on Red Hat Openstack Platform need virtualised network functions that interoperate effectively with the infrastructure and create a solid foundation for deployments. With this expanded NFV certification, Red Hat is adding new testing to ensure compatibility and supportability, to reduce risks and increase efficiency of the solutions created by a partner ecosystem. NFV subject matter experts within Red Hat will perform an architectural review, evaluating each VNF implementation to assess interoperability with Red Hat’s NFV OpenStack platform, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and KVM. This review process will harden the combined solution and establish collaborative engineering relationships between Red Hat and participating partners. Partners providing their own application runtime can validate that their VNF solution can be deployed as an appliance.