Cobham Wireless delivers on the promise of NFV with the TeraVM elastic test bed

STEVENAGE, UK, 9th June 2015 – Cobham Wireless, a global leader in the provision of advanced wireless coverage and mobile communication systems, has announced the launch of the TeraVM elastic test bed, a first-to-market NFV test solution, allowing 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, 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,” said 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 added: “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.

About Cobham

The most important thing we build is trust.

We protect lives and livelihoods with our differentiated technology and know-how, operating with a deep insight into customer needs, and agility.  Our innovative range of technologies and services solve challenging problems in harsh environments across commercial, defence and security markets, from deep space to the depths of the ocean, specialising in meeting the growing demand for data, connectivity and bandwidth.

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

About Cobham Wireless

Delivering state-of-the-art wireless and connectivity solutions that give our customers a competitive edge.

We are global leaders in the provision of 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.

Our intelligent digital Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS), along with our advanced network validation tools for mobile and IP networks, will help propel your network to the next generation.