Bigwigs unite to promote open standards for telco networks
OPNFV project to be chaired by HP’s Prodip Sen
Déjà vu struck the networking industry on Tuesday when a coalition of leading vendors declared that they’ve joined forces under the banner of The Linux Foundation to develop open standards meant to accelerate the adoption of next generation solutions. The elevator pitch is practically identical to that of the OpenDaylight Project the same suppliers launched last April, but the broader vision is most decisively not.
The one-and-a-half-year-old OpenDaylight Project, which marked its second major release just a day earlier, aims to unify the fragmented ecosystem of software-defined networking (SDN) solutions under a common management layer not controlled by any one player. In contrast, the new consortium with the mouthful of a name “Open Platform for NFV Project” (OPNFV) focuses on an entirely different paradigm: network function virtualization.
Whereas SDN emerged from academia as an effort to separate management functionality from traffic handling operations into a centralized layer of its own, NFV is a grassroots movement within the telecom industry to facilitate the delivery of network services without dedicated hardware. The two trends overlap in their goal of enabling greater operational agility and openness, but the industry’s biggest vendors seem to believe that technical differences are big enough to warrant two separate initiatives.
The founding members of the OPNFV include many familiar names from OpenDaylight, including networking kingpin Cisco Systems Inc., Juniper Networks Inc., IBM and several others. But the 38 launch sponsors is more than double than of the SDN initiative, thanks to the participation of newcomers such as French telecommunications equipment supplier Alcatel-Lucent SA and China Telecom Corp. Ltd., the third largest broadband provider in that country.
The primary objective of the project is to rally the NFV movement around a common platform that will incorporate “existing open source components where possible” and realize the full potential of the technology, hopefully becoming the de facto industry standard in the process. The first version is expected to ship as early as next year.
photo credit: oskay via photopin cc
Since you’re here …
… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
