With software-defined networking (SDN) in the early stages of turning into products and revenues, the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) is vying to fill the job of determining what's real and what's slideware.

ONUG is announcing Monday that it's building a set of open-source tests for software-defined networking (SDN) products, trying to establish benchmarks for scaling and performance.

The first round of testing will be a formalized affair, conducted by Lippis Enterprises at the Ixia iSimCity facility in Santa Clara, Calif. But after the results are presented -- at the ONUG fall meeting in New York on Oct. 29 and 30 -- the scripts for the tests will be released for anyone to use.

"What I want to find out is which companies are real. Any company that has confidence in their engineering and has products ready for prime time will enter the test," says Nick Lippis, who's the principal at Lippis Enterprises and also the vice chairman of ONUG.

The test bed consists of about 5,000 hypervisors and about 100,000 virtual machines stocked into 40 to 60 servers, Lippis says.

Lippis expects to run the tests starting Sept. 30. The deadline to enter a product is Aug. 30.

ONUG, founded last year, is a grass-roots gathering of IT people from major enterprise network owners, including financial houses. Its stated purpose is for users to discuss networking trends in general, but of course the focus has been on SDN.