Stating plans to harmonize under a single framework targeting telecom SDN and NFV plans, The Linux Foundation moves to consolidate open source efforts.
The Linux Foundation is looking to merge open source orchestration and management efforts, and perhaps reduce acronym clutter, by combining the open source enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy platform and Open Orchestrator Project into the newly formed Open Network Automation Platform Project.
The move is said to harmonize open source ECOMP and Open-O under a single framework for “real-time, policy driven software automation of virtual network functions that will enable software, network, IT and cloud providers and developers to rapidly create new services.” The Linux Foundation said it would establish governance and membership structure for ONAP, with the board set to guide business decisions, marketing and ensure alignment between the technical communities and members.
ONAP founding “platinum” members include Amdocs, AT&T, Bell Canada, China Mobile, China Telecom, Cisco, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Orange, Tech Mahindra, VMware and ZTE; with “silver” members including ARM, BOCO Inter-Telecom, Canonical, China Unicom, Cloudbase Solutions, Metaswitch and Raisecom.
“Creating a combined team of the initial open source ECOMP members with existing Open-O members bodes well for the project’s success,” said Chris Rice, SVP of Domain 2.0 architecture and design at AT&T. “We expect more consolidation in this space, and we expect many more service providers and other technology leaders to join us in this important work, which benefits the entire industry.”
Others noted the move should allow for a more cohesive approach for the telecommunications space as it looks towards broader deployment of software-defined networking and network functions virtualization technologies.
“Our close collaboration with AT&T during the past year and the broader new scope of the ONAP project is we believe a unique opportunity for our industry to make the SDN/NFV ecosystem scale while avoiding its fragmentation,” said Alain Maloberti, SVP of Orange Labs Networks, referencing the carrier’s ECOMP work with AT&T. “This ‘network operating system’ will enable fast growing, innovative and interoperable network and application services at a global scale.”
AT&T unveiled the ECOMP initiative early last year, which it said was designed to automate network services and infrastructure running in a cloud environment. The carrier said it had been working on ECOMP for nearly two years, tackling the project due to a lack of guidance for NFV and SDN deployments in a wide area network environment.
AT&T released the platform to the open source community earlier this year through The Linux Foundation, which included the release of source code, documentation, educational videos and a pair of sample use cases – one on virtual firewall and one on virtual domain name servers – into a public cloud for access to users and covered by the Apache 2.0 license. Stated goals of moving ECOMP into the open source community include delivering the capabilities for the design, creation, orchestration, monitoring and lifecycle management of VNFs in a SDN environment.
Open-O was founded early last year in an effort to guide an open source approach to orchestration for SDN and NFV work being conducted by networking companies. Initial partners included Brocade, China Mobile, China Telecom, DynaTrace, Ericsson, F5 Networks, GigaSpaces, Huawei, Infoblox, Intel, KT, Red Hat, Raisecom, Riverbed and ZTE.
The group last November unveiled its first release “Sun” that the organization said was designed to bridge the gap between virtualized functions and connectivity services for brownfield environments for residential and enterprise virtualized customer premises equipment use cases.
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