Cobham Wireless TeraVM elastic test bed to enable global sharing of NFV test pods

Robert Winters, TeraVM Director at Cobham Wireless

Stevenage, UK-based Cobham Wireless, a global provider of advanced wireless coverage and mobile communication systems, has launched its TeraVM elastic test bed, said to be a first-to-market network functions virtualisation (NFV) test solution.

The TeraVM elastic test bed is designed to allow network function vendors and service providers to share lab assets between facilities. This enables engineers to create virtual test pods to ‘stress test’ network functions, reducing ownership costs by eliminating the need for multiple labs all using proprietary hardware.

Network vendors, service providers and enterprises with global operations traditionally have very low utilisation of test assets, typically around 20%. Using the TeraVM elastic test bed, Cobham reports that this can be brought up to 80-90% as traffic generation resources can be dynamically reallocated to where they are needed most, bringing significant agility, scalability and cost savings to test operations.

The elastic test bed further enhances TeraVM, Cobham Wireless’ market-leading IP traffic emulation tool, by enabling test pods which can scale to terabits per second of application traffic. TeraVM is currently used by the world’s largest service providers, who are re-using their standard computing hardware for IP network performance validation.

“The ability to dynamically scale and reallocate test capacity, is addressing a pressing demand from operators to align testing with the overall NFV vision, while providing major cost-savings when compared with the traditional fixed lab environment,” says Robert Winters, TeraVM Director at Cobham Wireless. “The flexibility of the TeraVM elastic test bed allows service providers to adopt a ‘follow the sun’ pooled resource model, significantly increasing the utilisation rates of their testing assets and improving productivity as a result.”

 

Ian Langley, SVP, Cobham Wireless adds: “Cobham Wireless is committed to bringing innovative and unique products to market to meet the ever-changing needs of our customers. This latest enhancement to the TeraVM platform demonstrates to our global customer-base that we are committed to ensuring service providers and network vendors can take full advantage of network function virtualisation for both networking and network performance validation.”

The TeraVM elastic test bed is already deployed for functional verification in hundreds of discrete test beds which, when pooled together, create a single ‘terabit test bed’:- that is equivalent to 40 million stateful subscribers safely consuming video, data and voice traffic. It allows vendors to load, analyse and validate the performance of next generation firewalls by measuring individual quality of service in conjunction with the effectiveness of cybersecurity threat detection and isolation.

Cobham Wireless delivers advanced wireless coverage and mobile communications systems, producing innovative, cost-effective solutions that address market requirements for improved connectivity, greater capacity and better quality of experience. It offers intelligent digital Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS), along with advanced network validation tools for mobile and IP networks.

Cobham employ more than 12,000 people on five continents, and has customers and partners in over 100 countries, with interests in: wireless, audio, video and data communications, including satellite communications; as well as defence electronics; air-to-air refuelling; aviation services; life support and mission equipment.

 

 

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