GEANT taps ONOS SDN platform to connect European research facilities
The Open Network Lab’s Open Network Operating System project scored a significant deployment win as European-based GEANT said it’s using the platform for its testbed network.
GEANT, which is a collaboration of European national research and education organizations, said it’s using the Inter Cluster ONOS Network Application to help “define, build, test and rebuild highly scalable, high-capacity virtual networks quickly, easily and cost-effectively. The platform was developed by the Center for Research and Telecommunication Experimentation for Networked Communities and the University of Rome Tor Vergata/CNIT to manage communications between geographically distributed ONOS clusters.
The testbed currently includes four locations connected using software-defined networking technology based on OpenFlow in Amsterdam; Bratislava, Slovakia; Lubiana, Poland; and Prague. External locations tap into the network using legacy border gateway protocol routers directly into the Amsterdam location.
“This enables the entities connected to communicate together and with the rest of the universities and the research institutions attached to the global network,” the organization explained, adding the ONOS clusters can provide level-two connectivity between all the legacy routers connected at the edge of the network.
GEANT claims to connect more than 50 million users at 10,000 institutions across Europe in support of research in areas of energy, environment, space and medicine. The organization also works with partners in 65 countries outside Europe.
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. China Unicom also recently joined the organization.
The project recently unveiled its Blackbird platform, the second release from the ONOS community targeting the SDN 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.
RCR Wireless News recently spoke with Prajakta Joshi, director of product at O.N.Lab, who provided insight into the history of the group, the formation of ONOS and the recent Blackbird release.
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