The organizations behind the OpenDaylight Project are moving another element to the right on the periodic table this morning with the third release of their free network controller, which brings a host of new features and integrations that significantly expand the scope of supported use cases. And with the same stroke, the update nudges software-defined networkin that much closer to reality.

The aptly-named Lithium incarnation of the platform, which started its life on the drawing board of the Linux Foundation just over two years ago, introduces a full 10 months worth of improvements, most notably on the analytics front. Standing out in particular is a new time-series data repository that allows for the chronological organization of logs from the underlying networking equipment.

That can include not only the OpenFlow-based switches and routers most commonly used in software-defined environments but also older models that don’t support the protocol, which can now take advantage of OpenDaylight capabilities all the same thanks to backward compatibility added in conjunction with the new data aggregation functionality. That’s good news for the traditional enterprise.

The ability to deploy the controller on existing hardware reduces the budgetary obstacles to adoption, and specifically the need to purchase new equipment just to test out its features. Removing that entry barrier makes the other features included in Lithium that much more appealing for the large organizations that the project’s organizers are targeting.

Besides network activity logs, the new release also provides an object store for preserving data from the applications generating that traffic in order to ensure that the contents remain readily available after an outage. Lithium doesn’t stop at merely helping administrators prepare for disasters, however.

Complementing the application persistence function  is a monitoring service that the project’s organizations say provides a view of operations across every part of an OpenDaylight implementation, making it possible to find issues before they spread. To save organizations the time and resources that would have to be devoted to doing that digging manually, the new release makes the information accessible to third party analytic solutions through the OpenDaylight application interface.

The same interface allows the controller to plug into higher-level management frameworks such as OpenStack. Lithium builds on the existing support for the networking component of the cloud platform and adds integration with several additional functions, most importantly its recently launched virtual routing service and the policy engine used to automate the allocation of network resources.

The OpenDaylight Project is already operationalizing that functionality for a number of key use cases with specialized protocols designed to accommodate the requirements of the different systems and processes needed for each. There’s one for controlling fleets of connected devices, another meant to manage the wireless end-points serving those devices and four others that are all being made available as part of Lithium. More will no doubt follow as the project continues to be augmented with new features to support an ever expanding array of applications.

Photo via Hans Põldoja