ONOS project’s Blackbird SDN platform touts, ‘performance, scale, high availability’
The Open Network Lab’s Open Network Operating System project unveiled its Blackbird platform, the second release from the ONOS community targeting the software-defined networking market.
The Blackbird release is focused on “performance, scale and high availability,” while also addressing the challenge of “effectively determining the ‘carrier-grade quotient’ of the SDN control plane.” Blackbird’s backers claim current metrics, including Cbench, do not provide a complete or accurate view of the SDN control plane capabilities, which Blackbird is set to provide.
“As service providers start deploying SDN solutions not only in their labs but also to control and manage their carrier-scale networks, high performance, scalability and resilience become key architectural requirements for these solutions,” said Prajakta Joshi, director of products for the ONOS project. “Carrier-grade SDN platforms and solutions need to demonstrate these attributes and measure and qualify them with effective metrics.”
The ONOS project said the Blackbird release defines performance metrics connected with topology for both link-change latency and switch-change latency; flow operations throughput; intent northbound install, withdraw, reroute and throughput latency; scalability by measuring the ability to scale a control plane by adding capacity; and high availability by measuring uninterrupted operation in the wake of failures, maintenance and upgrades.
The project said its goal was to achieve 1 million flow operations per second and less than 100 milliseconds latency. Blackbird is said to meet most of those targets, with plans to continue optimizing the platform in future releases.
“Achieving the high availability required to deliver network resilience at the necessary scale without compromising performance as you add controller instances has been an elusive goal for open source SDN solutions and a barrier to adoption – until now,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director for ON.Lab. “Architected as a distributed system, ONOS is the first open-source SDN solution to achieve linear scale-out while maintaining high performance and availability. As the size of your network grows, ONOS instances can be added to scale the SDN control plane, and seamlessly deliver the needed throughput. This ability not only breaks down barriers to real-world deployment but also future-proofs your network.”
ON.Lab launched the ONOS project late last year targeting service providers with a scalable SDN control plan “featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control and service applications across mission critical networks.” Founding members of the ONOS initiative include AT&T, NTT Communications, Ciena, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel and NEC.
Huawei last month said it is using its ONOS partnership to build an open ecosystem designed to support commercial SDN deployments. The SDN platform will support the ONOS platform, the company said, with plans to work with the Open Networking Foundation and the network function virtualization-focused Open Platform for NFV project to create programmable SDN network architecture.
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