Cable television giant Comcast joins the open source ON.Lab ONOS and CORD initiatives focused on SDN, NFV and cloud development.
The Open Networking Laboratory scored a significant new member as cable telecommunications giant Comcast joined the organization’s Open Network Operating System Project.
The move sees Comcast join ON.Lab’s open source efforts on software-defined networking, network functions virtualization and cloud technologies. Those efforts include work on ONOS and the central office re-architected as a datacenter projects designed to develop platforms for creating and deploying new services at “cloud-like speed, independent of the access network architecture.”
“Software-defined networking and network functions virtualization are powerful, fast-evolving tools for network transformation,” said Dr. Nagesh Nandiraju, director of network architecture at Comcast, in a statement. “We look forward to bringing our perspective and experience to the fantastic community of technologists already working on these open source projects.”
Comcast joins current ONOS and CORD service provider members AT&T, China Unicom, Google, NTT Communications, SK Telecom and Verizon Communication; and vendor partners Ciena, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, NEC, Nokia, Radisys and Samsung. Ericsson and Huawai are also members of the ONOS community.
“Comcast, like the many network operators and service providers, is leveraging these emerging technologies as it evolves its network to meet next-generation demands,” ON.Lab noted in a statement. “A key component of the evolution is software distribution of the platform stack comprising ONOS, an SDN OS for service providers with scalability, high availability, high performance and the right abstractions to make it easy to create apps and services.”
ON.Lab in September released its ONOS Hummingbird SDN platform, which is the eighth from the organization. The platform is claimed to offer high availability and scalability, expanded southbound and northbound protocols, and improved ability to support incremental SDN on legacy devices.
ON.Lab last month announced a merger with fellow SDN organization Open Networking Foundation, with the combined entity to run under the ONF banner once the deal closes in late 2017. ON.Lab Founder and Executive Director Guru Parulkar is set to run the combined operations, with both entities maintaining “the integrity of both organizations and separate, but closely affiliated operations” focused on SDN and open source platforms until that time.
Parulkar earlier this year discussed ON.Lab and the ONOS Project as part of the RCR Wireless News NFV/SDN Reality Check video show.
The combined efforts of ON.Lab and ONF are set to include operations, membership, budget and employees. ONF counts 110 member companies, while ON.Lab states its ecosystem includes more than 70 companies and 17 partners.
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