Software is becoming an increasingly important part of telecommunication networks and deployments as both wired and wireless carriers look to add functionality to operations while increasing simplicity and reducing costs. RCR Wireless News is keeping an eye on recent developments through its weekly “Software” wrap up.
The Open Network Lab this week unveiled its open-source SDN Open Network Operating System that it said would be available for download beginning Dec. 5. The system is initially targeting service providers and is designed to provide a scalable software-defined networking control plan “featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control and service applications across mission critical networks.”
The consortium explained that the ONOS platform will allow telecom providers to “gradually migrate their existing networks to SDN without requiring instant forklift upgrades by supporting a diversity of southbound devices and interfaces in addition to OpenFlow.”
Founding members of the ONOS initiative include AT&T, NTT Communications, Ciena, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel and NEC.
“[SDN] can radically reshape the wide-area network,” said John Donovan, senior EVO at AT&T’s Technology and Operations division. “The introduction of ONOS provides another open source SDN option designed for service-provider networks with the potential to deliver the performance, scale, availability and core features that we value.”
The “another” comment would seem to be a nod to the various other SDN and network function virtualization partnerships and platforms launched over the past year all looking to ease the deployment of SDN and virtualized systems for telecom operators.
Infonetics Research earlier this week released a report forecasting $11 billion in annual sales related to SDN and NFV by 2018. For its prediction, the firm broke the market down into three categories, with revenue from new SDN and NFV software to make up 20% of the market by 2018; “displaced” revenue from NFV-related products that a company buys instead of buying network hardware to make up 12% of the market; and revenue from newly identified segments of existing markets, including virtualized network functions, ports on routers, switches and SDN-capable optical gear making up 68% of revenues.
In other software-related news across the telecom space:
•Hewlett-Packard and Wind River deepened their working relationship by announcing a partnership to develop solutions using HP’s Helion OpenStack technology to support carrier-grade NFV capabilities.
HP earlier this year joined Wind River’s Titanium Cloud partner program, which included plans to validate Wind River’s NFV software solution running across HP’s ProLiant servers for applications operating in the NFV space.
•Juniper Networks this week launched a virtualized version of its MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routing platform that it claims to be a carrier-grade virtualized router. The virtualized product operates as software on X86 servers and allows service providers and enterprises to leverage virtual and physical networking to speed up the rollout of services and cut costs.
•Cloud communications provider Nexmo announced a partnership with Belgacom International Carrier Services calling for Nexmo to provide its enterprise and application developer customers with upgraded mobile voice quality and services in areas of BICS’ direct service reach across portions of North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
•Packet optical networking solutions provider Transmode said it has joined the OpenDaylight project as a “silver” member. The OpenDaylight project in early 2013 was spun out of The Linux Foundation with members working to integrate technologies and code to deliver a common, open-source platform for network programmability around SDN and NFV.
•Software provider 6Wind announced support for Dell’s NFV platform by showing a demonstration of its Virtual Accelerator software at the recent Dell World event. The demonstration was to show 6Wind’s software providing a speed boost that would allow service providers to run their virtual network functions on top of Dell hardware.
Make sure to check out the latest in telecom-related software news at RCR Wireless News’ dedicated software page. Also, if you have telecom software news to share, please send it along to: dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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