Ixia, a Keysight Business, Enables Service Providers to Accelerate NFV Deployment with NFVi Benchmarking Solution

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS), a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, announced Cloud Peak, a turnkey solution that helps service providers accelerate Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) deployment with rigorous NFV infrastructure (NFVi) performance testing and benchmarking.

As service providers launch 5G and business services, they look to adopt software defined networks (SDN) and NFV to ensure agility for services deployment, as well as a cost-effective network infrastructure. While still early, the development of NFVi is growing. IDC has forecasted a compound annual growth rate of 58.1% for NFVi from 2017 to 2022.¹

"NFVi adds a new layer of complexity, yet it enables service providers to accelerate NFV deployment and realize its business benefits," said Sunil Kalidindi, vice president of product management for Keysight's Ixia Solutions Group. "With NFVi, the burden of system-level testing shifts from the network equipment provider to the service provider who needs to integrate the virtual network functions with their own customized server infrastructure. Cloud Peak enables the service provider to characterize the infrastructure to understand what it can handle, how to improve it, and if it is reaching its capacity."

Cloud Peak brings together Ixia's comprehensive test capabilities and expertise in validating NFV throughout the continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, including disaggregated fabric benchmarking, NFVi characterization, service-chain and virtual network functions (VNF) validation and onboarding.

Cloud Peak offers service providers the following key benefits:

• Simplified NFVi benchmarking via a web-based, easy-to-use automation solution
• An Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) that integrates the powerful, but complex OPNFV Yardstick framework for infrastructure compliance
• Elastic workloads that scale from testing a single server to a datacenter
• Powerful analytics that provide extensive reporting and real-time dashboards

Cloud Peak delivers a rigorous set of methodologies to understand the capabilities and performance of an infrastructure under varied conditions, to evaluate design tradeoffs, upgrades and component swaps, and to identify performance bottlenecks. This enables service providers to determine the size of the infrastructure needed, evaluate and decide between vendors and technology approaches, and optimize the infrastructure to run specific VNF workloads. Cloud Peak's first release focuses on VMware vCenter and OpenStack, the leading carrier platforms for NFV and VMWare NFV infrastructure.

About Keysight Technologies

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS) is a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world. Keysight's solutions optimize networks and bring electronic products to market faster and at a lower cost with offerings from design simulation, to prototype validation, to manufacturing test, to optimization in networks and cloud environments. Customers span the worldwide communications ecosystem, aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, semiconductor and general electronics end markets. Keysight generated revenues of $3.9B in fiscal year 2018. More information is available at www.keysight.com.

Additional information about Keysight Technologies is available in the newsroom at https://www.keysight.com/go/news and on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

¹ IDC, IDC Forecasts Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) Revenues to Reach $5.6 Billion in 2022. August 23, 2018