Overture and several partners have created a multivendor service chain of virtual network functions (VNFs), delivering services over Carrier Ethernet with a line-rate throughput of 1 Gb/s with low latency and low jitter. Overture has already sold the service to Masergy, which is currently using it.

Last month, Overture joined with several of its partners, including Brocade, Fortinet, Supermicro, Ixia, and Spirent, to have the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC) independently test the product. Today it's releasing the results to show that the service chain can provide carrier-class performance without proprietary hardware or software.

The VNFs for the test ran on a Supermicro 505-2 server. Overture provided its Ensemble Carrier Ethernet VNF, which worked with a Brocade vRouter and a Fortinet virtual firewall. Ixia and Spirent provided testing services.

Brian Irish, Overture’s director of marketing, says if a customer decides it wants to work with a different vendor for any aspect of the service chain, it’s free to do so.

“When we talk to customers at Tier 1 service providers, they are eliminating vendors that are requiring them to get everything from that one vendor,” says Irish. “They want the ability to truly have an open system.”

The partners conducted their test under sponsorship of the Intel Network Builders program. Testing was conducted in October at the EANTC labs in Berlin.

EANTC created a test profile that simulated real-world traffic for evaluating the performance of each VNF. The Layer 7 traffic profile reflected typical Internet usage, and network address translation (NAT) masquerading was added to increase complexity for the router. A set of 100 rules provided realistic complexity for the firewall. VNFs were then deployed in a full service chain and tested with the realistic traffic mix.