Huawei, Linux Foundation, China Mobile among members of open-source project; touted as first of its kind initiative for China
BARCELONA, Spain – In order to lend agility and innovation to mobile operators, the Linux Foundation, China Mobile and Huawei announced the Open-O Project, which will look to integrate network functions virtualization and software-defined networking technology through orchestration software.
Speakers at a jointly hosted event described 2016 as the year of open source, while lauding China’s involvement in Open-O, touted as a first-of-its-kind undertaking for the nation. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin said Open-O Project builds on other efforts like Open Network Lab’s Open Network Operating System project, OpenDaylight and the Linux Foundation’s Open Platform Network Function Virtualization project, all aimed at integrating open source code into telecom applications.
“The Linux Foundation is very excited today to be part of this effort,” said Zemlin. “We really believe that software is transforming the networking sector in a massive way. In order to meet the demand for scalability…bandwidth, interesting new products and services, a transformation from a traditional hardware network to a software network is critical. … The foundation for this software transformation is happening in the open with open source. The question is, why is that happening? The reason is that we’re living in what we kind of call the post proprietary age. That doesn’t mean proprietary software is going away. It means in order to build the future of networking, there is more software to be written than any one company or organization can write by themselves.”
Zemlin pointed to China Mobile as a huge opportunity for NFV and SDN given its sheer complexity; China Mobile has approximately 800 million mobile subscribers and more than 1 million LTE base stations with ambitions to construct hundreds of thousands more this year.
Yang Zhiqiang, deputy GM of the China Mobile Research Institute, said Open-O will play a key role in creating NFV- and SDN-powered networks in need of “end-to-end orchestration. … NFV and SDN will be two key technical enablers in the future network and orchestrator is the central component for automatic operation. The orchestrator could realize the global resource management and the monitoring. The most important thing is that automatic network orchestrator could also help operators transform.”
Zhiqiang entertained the room with the quip that OSS leads to OSS; that is to say operation support system to open source software.
Hou Yuzhou, VP of global technical service, head of service strategy and chair of the service architecture board at Huawei, explained that once fully realized, Open-O will enable agility in operators looking to bring new services to market more quickly.
“Our strategy is to enable the operator’s business success through system integration,” Yuzhou explained. “The orchestrator is the core component for NFV/SDN-based systems integration and involves a large number of multivendor interfaces. Huawei embraces open source with the aim of achieving an industry standard, together with industry partners, and to realize flexible resource orchestration and scheduling in a multivendor environment, thereby accelerating operators’ operations and transformation and driving future business growth.”
Other project partners include China Telecom, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Red Hat, F5 and others. In the early phase of the Open-O Project, the group is looking to add additional participants to grow the community. The Open-O Project has reportedly been funded to the tune of $30 million over three years.
