There will be something on display at Integrated Systems Europe 2014 that nobody has ever seen before —an AVnu Alliance certified product.
Extreme Networks has earned the first AVnu-certification for its family of Summit 440 Switches, with 14 products becoming certified.
“That family has been shipping for two years and the AVB [Audio Video Bridging] software has been available since [February 2013,” says Todd Acree, director of product management for Extreme Networks.
“We started the certification program late spring. We completed it in December and wanted to tell everybody about it in time for the ISE show.”
The certification moniker matters for integrators, Acree says, because it’s always uncomfortable when you have to wonder if a product will perform as promised or not. “Having the certification in place takes all those worries and concerns off the table.”
“Think about it from a consultant perspective,” adds AVnu Alliance president Rick Kreifeldt.
“It’s a lot simpler for them if they can just specify ‘AVnu certiication’ on the product. So they don’t need to worry about which part of the AVB protocol did you implement? Did you implement it all? … All those questions that come up.”
That begs the question of when there will be more products that are AVnu-certified.
“As you can imagine there are numerous companies right now that have their products in the pipeline. That’s going to be the big news in 2014 from the AVnuu side; you’re going to see more bridges; you’re going to see the end points; and you’re going to get to the point where you have really a good wealth of products to choose from and you can say, ‘Yeah, that’s AVnu-certified,’ and you’ll know they’re going to work together.”
More from AVnu Alliance on the announcement:
On AVnu-Certification …
– Certification is the way to ensure that end users get a good experience because products from different manufacturers are interoperable. AVnu Alliance has created a robust and complex compliance and interoperability certification program to ensure interoperability across a broad ecosystem of A/V devices across the network infrastructure.
– Once a product has passed the testing procedures at an AVnu-appointed test house, the member manufacturer may use the AVnu certification logo on that device. This is the first and only independent AV networking certification test program.
– “The Alliance chose to do more than simply connect products together and check that they can connect and stream.Instead, we developed a robust set of hundreds of conformance tests that ensure devices implement AVB standards consistently—which is the only way to ensure interoperability,” said AVnu Alliance President, Rick Kreifeldt.
On the first certified family of products …
– The first AVnu-certified family of products is an AVB series of switches from Extreme Networks that has passed all testing for certification and will now bear the AVnu Certified Logo.
– “We are thrilled to see the first AVnu-certified family of switches from Extreme Networks. This is just the first of many AVnu-certified products to come, but an important start. We are proud of Extreme Networks’ dedication to furthering the momentum of AVB,” adds Kreifeldt.
– “AVB provides an infrastructure that supports a level of scalability and flexibility that is extremely important for our switches. We put our product through the extensive testing and are extremely proud to announce it as the first AVnu-certified series of switches on the market,” said Todd Acree, Director of Product Management at Extreme Networks, AVnu Alliance member.
“We chose to pursue AVnu certification for our Summit X440 Series family of switches because it takes the complexity of managing and optimizing the network out of the question, thereby simplifying system design, costs and maintenance, all while improving performance, reliability and overall network functionality.”
