opnfv, Author at OPNFV - Page 17 of 17

Feb 03

Open Collaboration is Paving the Path for NFV

By opnfv Blog

I am thrilled to be joining OPNFV as its Director of NFV working directly with those who are committed to advancing open source NFV for all. I am excited about this organization, this technology, this community, and what the future holds for NFV.

Let me explain what lead me to OPNFV. I have a long running passion for open source and open communities, most recently through my role at MongoDB where I got to experience being at an open source company first-hand. Before that most of my career was spent in the telecom industry where I held a variety of positions including running a partner program for CPE, doing solutions marketing for the IP Division at Alcatel-Lucent, business development, and participating in numerous standards activities. I was most active at Broadband Forum where I helped create and launch TR-069, served as BroadbandHome Technical Working Group Chair, served on the board, and oversaw collaborative activities with ATIS, 3GPP, OSGi, ITU-T, OMA, IETF, Small Cell Forum, UPnP Forum, Home Gateway Initiative, and other groups.

I am keenly interested in NFV and SDN and the evolution they represent. When I started in this industry we were just starting to roll out broadband, and a feature flip phone was still considered somewhat of a luxury. The intervening time has seen high-speed internet give way to triple-play give way to OTT streaming, the rise of the smart phone, and both the increasingly rapid evolution of cellular technology and almost ubiquity of WiFi. The rise of smart home, connected car, M2M, IoT and wearables is further transforming the kinds of services that networks deliver and what subscribers expect.

It’s an exciting time to be designing network-based services, but these services have added layers of complexity to deployment. I’ve watched the proliferation of custom-built network elements, the explosion of devices, a surge in applications with a range of needs, the evolution of wireless and wired technology and more. Not only is this a CapEx nightmare, but managing and provisioning services and attempting to ensure applications get the network resources they need is an operational migraine.

As I’ve watched NFV get its legs under it conceptually I’ve been incredibly interested in its ability to attack that ever-burgeoning complexity. Software continues to eat the world, and as it comes for the network, an incredible transformation is underway–one that will allow the network to be more agile and more responsive to the demands of applications.

With such major changes facing us as an industry, it is no wonder open source is paving the path. This change is bigger than any single company, and working collaboratively is the only way we can get there. I’ve been impressed with the passion of the OPNFV technical community, and I know that it will only grow. I’m also excited to see the passion of other communities like OpenDaylight and OpenStack and I look forward to the collaboration and cross-pollination amongst the engineers of all these projects.

This is going to be an incredibly important year for NFV. We’ve seen the industry create some important architectural concepts and use cases through the work at ETSI NFV and OPNFV is excited to deliver its first release to help form the foundation for NFV. In my next blog I’ll expand on the role of OPNFV and how it aims to leverage existing projects that will help set our path. 2015 is only the beginning of our journey. We are looking to fundamentally change the way network capabilities are created, deployed, and managed. The wave of what we start to build this year will be felt for years to come. We have an amazing community in the making, and I hope you will decide to be a part of it.

About the author of this post

Heather Kirksey
Director, OPNFV.

Feb 03

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Enea, Korea Telecom, SK Telecom, Spirent and Xilinx Join the OPNFV Project

By opnfv Announcements

New investments advance development and community growth of open source network functions virtualization

SAN FRANCISCO, February 3, 2015 — The OPNFV Project, a community-led industry supported open source reference platform for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced that Enea, Korea Telecom, SK Telecom, Spirent and Xilinx are joining the project to advance the industry’s first integrated, open source NFV platform.

Launched in September 2014, OPNFV is enabling widespread collaboration between users and vendors who are developing an integrated and tested open source NFV reference platform that can enable faster implementation of new products and services. With a growing member base now totaling 49 members and a community gearing up for its first software release, OPNFV is leading the way toward broad adoption of open source NFV.

“Having a neutral place where the industry can collaborate on code development will help bring NFV to market faster,” said Heather Kirksey, director of NFV, OPNFV. “Our newest members are committed to advancing open source NFV and we welcome their unique perspectives on everything from real-time operating systems to large-scale network management to programmable devices. We invite anyone who is curious about OPNFV to join our weekly technical calls that are open to the public and participate in discussions.”

More on the newest OPNFV members, listed in alphabetical order:

Enea, headquartered in Sweden, is a global supplier of Linux and real-time operating system solutions, including middleware, tools, databases, and world class services, with a vision to enable communication everywhere.

“The OPNFV project presents a great opportunity for Enea to contribute with our expertise, accelerate innovation and retain our leading position as an Independent Software Vendor in the communication space,” said Daniel Forsgren, senior vice president, product management, Enea. “We are excited to join and collaborate with the developer community in this neutral and open community to advance NFV.”

Korea Telecom (KT) is Korea’s national telecommunications provider who has been leading the NFV adoption efforts in Korea. KT has committed to the adoption of newer technologies to ensure quality service to its customers.

“For KT, SDN/NFV is the key technology to reduce cost for network infrastructure and to implement services delivering new customer experience. KT currently reviews the application of the technologies in various directions for the key infrastructure,” noted HongBeom Jeon, head, infrastructure R&D laboratory, KT. “We expect that OPNFV will help us to establish agile NFV infrastructure and to deliver the benefits of software-defined infrastructure to our customers.”

SK Telecom, headquartered in Seoul, is Korea’s largest telecommunications company with more than 28 million mobile subscribers, accounting for over 50 percent of the market. SK Telecom is also seeking new growth engines by building ICT convergence business models in areas of healthcare, enterprise solutions, media and education.

“Faster adoption of NFV is critical to prepare the next generation of mobile networks and 5G architectures and to facilitate the NFV ecosystem,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, chief technology officer, SK Telecom. “We are eager to collaborate with the OPNFV community to advance the implementation of NFV in the industry.”

Spirent Communications is the global leader in developing innovative test solutions that allow IT and communications industries to evaluate the performance, agility and security of the latest technologies, infrastructure and applications being deployed worldwide.

“As the industry is transitioning toward virtualization of networks and applications, validation of SDN and NFV technologies is becoming mission-critical. Joining OPNFV is a natural fit for us as the community’s goal aligns with Spirent’s mission of validating NFV foundational elements and accelerating their adoption in service providers, data center and enterprise environments,” said Neil Holmquist, senior director, product marketing and management, Spirent Communications. “We are eager to share our test and measurement expertise with OPNFV community.”

Xilinx is a leading provider of All Programmable technologies and devices, beyond hardware to software, digital to analog, and single to multiple die in 3D ICs.

“Xilinx is excited to contribute to OPNFV,” said Gilles Garcia, director of wired communication at Xilinx. “We are hopeful that the open source NFV platform will help us address the ever-evolving demands of next-generation networks and enable new technologies.”

Anyone can participate in the OPNFV community regardless of affiliation or location. Technology contributions, concepts or ideas can be shared here. Join the discussions, listen to the debates and contribute to the advancement of open source NFV.

About Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)

Open Platform for NFV is a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using NFV. It brings together service providers, vendors and users to collaborate in an open forum on advancing the state-of-the-art in NFV. For more information, please visit: http://www.opnfv.org.

OPNFV is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.www.linuxfoundation.org

Additional Resources

Media Inquires
Prathima Ramesh
OPNFV Project
pr@opnfv.org

Dec 17

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OPNFV – Our First 90 Days

By opnfv Blog

In 2014, the widespread interest in creating a platform for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) was evident across all sectors. NFV is moving out of the labs and into the field. A recent study by Infonetics predicts that the SDN and NFV markets are expected to exceed $11 billion by 2018. We’re excited to see the industry embrace open source as the way to bring NFV to market faster.

The OPNFV Project was launched at the end of September with the intention of creating an open source reference platform for NFV. The number and diversity of the member companies supporting the project is a validation of the high level of hope on open source as the preferred delivery method for a de facto standard NFV platform. Since the launch, the OPNFV community has been growing steadily with the addition of five new member companies bringing the total to 44.

The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) reviewed 33 project ideas at its first HackFest during the first week after launch, many of which are being formally adopted into OPNFV as TSC approved projects. The OPNFV community has agreed to focus on the establishment of our integration and baseline platform during formation, while establishing several NFV-related projects expecting to deliver into the second release of 2015. To this end the community and TSC have been busy reviewing and approving several of the projects and establishing methodologies for community collaboration. Oh, and our software release names will be river-themed.

We also gathered in force at OpenStack Summit in November where we invested time meeting the OpenStack community and finding ways to collaborate on feature development and testing. Cross community collaboration is a key focus area for 2015 with the OPNFV community looking to invest in and providing value both to our user and developer communities.

The community is excited about taking the ideas to the next step in 2015. The team has plans to collaborate at the following events — a Meet-up at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, February 19-20 at Santa Rosa, Calif, and Hackfests around ETSI NFV#9 in Prague, February 23-24, and the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, May 18-22. See the latest Hackfests and Meet-ups schedule here.

The belief that many minds are better than one is the driving force behind open source. It’s your code, ideas and feedback that will make open source NFV a reality. The community is excited about taking the ideas to the next step in 2015. We invite you to get involved as we collaborate to deliver the industry’s first open source reference platform for NFV in 2015!

About the author of this post

Chris Price
Chris leads open source industry collaboration for Ericsson in the areas of NFV, Cloud & SDN from the CTO’s office in Sweden and is an active member of the technical steering comitee’s of the OpenDaylight and OPNFV Projects. Chris’ experiences include leading Ericssons’ IP&Broadband network architecture and standardization teams with a rich history in development of systems and technology in the areas of network management, policy control and user service management, user session control plane solutions, and DPI technologies.

Dec 11

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Array Networks, Midokura, Ooredoo and Sonus Networks Join the OPNFV Project

By opnfv Announcements

Members collaborate to advance an open source platform for Network Functions Virtualization

SAN FRANCISCO, December 11, 2014 — The OPNFV Project, a community-led industry supported open source reference platform for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced that Array Networks, Midokura, Ooredoo and Sonus Networks are joining the project. The companies will join existing members to support a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform to advance the evolution of NFV and to ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components. OPNFV is supported by 44 member companies and has formed a Technical Steering Committee (TSC) to establish technical direction for the project.

OPNFV brings together end users and vendors to develop an integrated and tested open source NFV platform that can accelerate the introduction of new products and services. The project will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and to ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components.

“OPNFV is about global participation by a diverse group of suppliers to create an open platform that we can all use to achieve the promise of NFV,” said Margaret Chiosi, president, OPNFV. “With increasing interest throughout the industry, the project is poised to play a key role in the acceleration and availability of NFV. We welcome our new silver members, Array Networks, Midokura, Ooredoo and Sonus Networks, who represent the types of members we need, in helping us implement the goals of open source NFV.”

ZTE Corporation Joins the OPNFV Project as a Platinum Member

By opnfv Announcements

Company commits to advancing a state-of-the-art open source NFV platform to expand its services portfolio

SAN FRANCISCO, November 18, 2014 — The OPNFV Project, a community-led industry supported open source reference platform for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced that ZTE Corporation has joined as a Platinum member to advance open source NFV. ZTE Corporation joins the other Platinum members including AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DOCOMO, Red Hat, Telecom Italia and Vodafone.

OPNFV is an open source project focused on accelerating the evolution of NFV. OPNFV is establishing a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and to ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components. It is expected to increase performance and power efficiency, improve reliability, availability and serviceability, and deliver comprehensive platform instrumentation.

ZTE Corporation is an active participant in developing software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV technologies. The company has collaborated on open source technical projects with many domestic and international operators and research institutions. ZTE has built several solutions based on these technologies to help operators meet the changing demands of customers and quickly implement new business models.

“The market is embracing SDN and NFV, which opens doors for many opportunities for the industry to innovate and provide new services much faster,” said Dr. Xianming Zhao, CTO, ZTE Corporation. “Industry-wide collaboration on an open NFV platform will allow us to address critical concerns upfront and build a common reference platform. This will establish an open ecosystem for NFV solutions based on open standards and open source software.”

“The advent of SDN and NFV has brought about the biggest shift in networking in the past 20 years,” said Margaret Chiosi, president, OPNFV. “To make the technologies successful, we need to collaborate to build a common foundation for the future of networks. We look forward to seeing ZTE take an active role in helping to make OPNFV and open source NFV successful.”

Dick Chen, principal architect of corporate CTO group, ZTE, will join OPNFV’s board of directors, and Jun Zhang, radio network architect, ZTE, will join OPNFV’s Technical Steering Committee. As part of its Platinum membership, ZTE is dedicating additional employee resources to OPNFV to help build the reference platform for NFV.

About Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)

Additional Resources
Getting Started with OPNFV
Joining the OPNFV Community
OPNFV Blog
OPNFV Events
Media Inquires
Prathima Ramesh
OPNFV Project
pr@opnfv.org

Oct 27

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Industry Leaders Talk Open Source NFV at World Congress

By opnfv Blog

With 1,300 attendees–nearly double from last year–SDN OpenFlow & World Congress in Dusseldorf was a melting pot of ideas that reflected the growing interest and demand for NFV. It was clear that open SDN and NFV are the future of carrier infrastructures. Even more evident was the focus on openness in building solutions that address critical industry challenges. In his keynote address Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation talked about how open source is redefining the networking space and why companies should utilize open source communities to solve industry issues. “Open source isn’t just a powerful business tool. It is the idea that all of us are smarter than any one of us that makes it a blockbuster,” he said.

Speaking on behalf of OPNFV, Margaret Chiosi introduced the new project saying it’s supported heavily by end users and vendors and will work with other open source projects like OpenStack and OpenDaylight: “I would say that we may not be successful if we really have to do a fork. We have to be more like a branch, working with each other. If OPNFV’s needs don’t help anybody else in the open source community, then we will lose the battle. Because the goal of this — to ‘win,’ I guess — is to ride the IT wave of all the innovation that’s happening.”

Jim, Margaret and others all emphasized the philosophy of being truly open and the value of staying involved in projects to create common solutions for the industry. Margaret made an open call to everyone interested in advancing open source NFV to participate in OPNFV, regardless of membership status, and voice their opinions on how to build an open NFV reference platform for the industry. Follow the work of OPNFV technical steering committee at: https://wiki.opnfv.org.

Oct 10

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We Launched, Now What?

By opnfv Blog

Highlights from OPNFV’s first week

When the OPNFV Project launched last week there was a lot of excitement surrounding the news with carriers and vendors alike showing tremendous support. Significant work has been done to scope what Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) means for the telecom industry. Now with OPNFV we undertake a project determined to evolve and validate these assumptions.

Our first week was spent coalescing the energy and support of the community into communicable activity and a plan. It is an exciting time to be involved, as the community is coming together on the practical side of these initial discussions to establish integral activities and direction.

With the help of the Linux Foundation, we hosted our first community HackFest with more than 70 people in attendance. In addition, we ran the inaugural Technical Steering Committee (TSC) meeting to start laying a foundation from which we can build a vibrant developer community and the infrastructure that will sustain the project.

The first order of business for the TSC was to jumpstart a discussion about the community’s first release slated for 2015. These discussions, ably facilitated by members of the TSC, uncovered more than 30 project ideas about features, the development process, collaboration with upstream projects, establishing a release protocol and much more. This ideation, coupled with the willingness from those present to understand and cooperate, gives me confidence that we have established a project with meaningful objectives. All progress on the project will be communicated through the developer wiki.

One of our foremost objectives is to develop an integrated and tested open source platform that can be used to investigate and demonstrate NFV functionality. While it is clear that in the short term we will need to converge on a few fundamental projects to establish our baseline release, I expect to see a broad range of project proposals make their way onto the wiki as our community finds its rhythm.

The role of the TSC is to work with upstream communities, guide the release process and help determine which projects will be included in the OPNFV architecture for the first release. Our weekly calls are open to the public and we encourage all to join and provide input.

One of the great benefits of open source is the inherent conviction that many minds are better than one — the more people who participate, share ideas, debate and argue, the better the code to the benefit of the entire industry.

I would like to offer an open invitation to anyone who is interested in this project to participate in the OPNFV open source community, regardless of affiliation or location. If you have a technology contribution, concept or idea, you can share it here. Join the discussions, listen to the debates and come help us make open source NFV a reality for all.

About the author of this post

Sep 30

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Telecom Industry and Vendors Unite to Build Common Open Platform to Accelerate Network Functions Virtualization

By opnfv Announcements

New NFV platform will accelerate cloud-based delivery models for operators, enable interoperability and accelerate standards through an open source reference implementation

SAN FRANCISCO, September 30, 2014 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the founding of the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV). OPNFV will be a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services.

Platinum-level founding members include AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DOCOMO, Red Hat, Telecom Italia and Vodafone. Silver-level founding members include 6WIND, Alcatel-Lucent, ARM, Broadcom, CableLabs, Cavium, CenturyLink, Ciena, Citrix, ClearPath Networks, ConteXtream, Coriant, Cyan, Dorado Software, Ixia, Metaswitch Networks, Mirantis, Ooredoo, Orange, Overture Networks, Sandvine, Sprint and Wind River.

“Open source code has been proven to accelerate innovation and time to market for new technologies,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “The Open Platform for NFV will bring together providers, cloud and infrastructure vendors, developers and users alike to define a new type of reference platform for the industry, integrating existing open source building blocks with new components and testing that accelerates development and deployment of NFV. We are excited to host this important industry initiative that will provide a common foundation for the future of networks.”

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are part of the overall industry shift towards network and application virtualization. Together they are expected to dramatically change the networking landscape, allowing providers to deliver new services to their customers more quickly while significantly reducing both operating and capital expenditures. These technologies bring both cloud computing and Information Technology (IT) capabilities and benefits into the telecom industry, enabling new levels of flexibility and business growth opportunities for providers. Service provider applications have different demands than most IT applications, so an open platform integrating multiple open source components and ensuring continuous testing for carrier-grade service performance is essential to this transition.

OPNFV will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components. Because multiple open source NFV building blocks already exist, OPNFV will work with upstream projects to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.

OPNFV is expected to increase performance and power efficiency; improve reliability, availability and serviceability; and deliver comprehensive platform instrumentation. The initial scope of OPNFV will be on building NFV infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualized Infrastructure Management (VIM) leveraging existing open source components where possible.

The initial project objectives are to:

develop an integrated and tested open source platform that can be used to investigate and demonstrate core NFV functionality;
include proactive participation of leading end users to validate that OPNFV meets the needs of the end user community;
contribute to and participate in relevant open source projects that will be leveraged in the OPNFV reference platform;
establish an open ecosystem for NFV solutions based on open standards and open source software; and
promote OPNFV as the preferred open reference platform.

While not developing standards, OPNFV will work closely with ETSI’s NFV ISG, among others, to drive consistent implementation of standards for an open NFV reference platform. When open source software development is aligned with standards development, it can root out issues early, identify resolutions and become the de facto codebase, resulting in a far more economical approach to platform development.

OPNFV will license new components under the Apache License Version 2.0 and will work within the licensing requirements of upstream projects in order to contribute code back to these projects. A Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee (TSC) will govern the initiative. The Board will be made up of representatives from member companies and will set the business direction and scope of the project. The TSC will also provide technical governance and leadership for the project.

Board officers for OPNFV include:

Prodip Sen, board chair (HP)
Margaret Chiosi, president (AT&T)
Wenjing Chu, secretary (Dell)
Hui Deng, treasurer (China Mobile)

OPNFV is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. By spreading the collaborative DNA of the largest collaborative software development project in history, The Linux Foundation provides the essential collaborative and organizational framework so project hosts can focus on innovation and results. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects span the enterprise, mobile, embedded and life sciences markets and are backed by many of the largest names in technology. For more information about Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects, please visit: http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org. To learn more about OPNFV and start contributing today, please visit: http://www.opnfv.org.

Comments from ETSI
Dr. Steven Wright (AT&T), the newly elected Chairman of the NFV ISG commented: “I congratulate the OPFNV founders on the formation of this new open source community supporting NFV. The NFV ISG’s mission is to facilitate the industry transformation and development of an open, interoperable, ecosystem through specification, implementation and deployment experience. The ISG recognizes the value of open source implementations to converge industry requirements and facilitate the development of the NFV ecosystem. I look forward to the future releases of the integrated open source infrastructure platform from OPNFV.”

Comments from OpenDaylight
“Open source is quickly becoming a de facto standard for cloud platforms (Openstack), SDN (OpenDaylight) and virtual switches (Open vSwitch) because it’s a neutral playing field that everyone can build on and integrate with. I see strong interest from carriers to leverage these open source projects for their NFV deployments and we look forward to collaborating with OPNFV as they work to stitch these technologies together,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight Project.

Comments from OpenStack
“NFV will help carriers and enterprises deliver new and innovative services to their customers much more efficiently,” said Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director, OpenStack Foundation. “The OpenStack community has been working to address the massive opportunity NFV presents, and we look forward to collaborating with OPNFV to advance these critical infrastructure efforts through open source development.”

Comments from Open vSwitch
“The telecom industry is going through a major transition, led by the increased adoption of network virtualization to transform how service providers build and operate their networks,” said Justin Pettit, staff engineer, VMware, and project lead and a leading contributor for Open vSwitch. “This type of evolution requires broad collaboration among leading companies, developers and open source projects.”

Comments from Platinum-Level Members

AT&T
“As a member, AT&T hopes OPNFV will create an Open Platform with software and hardware to expedite NFV implementation. OPNFV is a unique organization that provides an ecosystem for users to work directly with the Open Source development community for an NFV platform,” said Margaret T. Chiosi, Distinguished Network Architect, AT&T Labs.

Brocade
“Operators are seeking new business models that facilitate the expansion of services and revenue streams, while lowering operational costs and complexity,” said Ken Cheng, chief technology officer (CTO) at Brocade. “As a founding member of OPNFV, Brocade will draw on its years of SDN and NFV development to collaborate with service providers and industry peers in order to accelerate the adoption of these transformational technologies.”

China Mobile
“We are happy to see many operators to work together to jointly develop NFV platform,” said Bill Huang, GM of China Mobile Research Institute. “We expect OPNFV to lead the open source development of next generation core network elements and application.”

Cisco
“It’s perfect timing for the emergence of an open platform and developer community in the networking industry to accelerate NFV, service chaining and cloud-based services,” said David Ward, Senior Vice President, Chief Architect, and Chief Technology Officer-Development, Cisco. “Our goal for the community is to drive successful co-development and co-innovation with our customers, partners and community of users. We will not only contribute running code and Cisco resources to the OPNFV community, we will utilize the efforts of OPNFV internally to accelerate our ability to bring innovative, interoperable solutions to market. This consortium creates what developers, providers, enterprises and vendors need – a common platform for NFV innovation acceleration.”

Dell
“OPNFV will allow service providers access to the latest technologies and innovations for cloud-based service delivery,” said Arpit Joshipura, vice president, Dell Networking. “We’re dedicated to OPNFV’s mission and proud to participate as a founding Platinum member in this important initiative.”

Ericsson
“There are important standards in place for SDN and NFV, as well as a variety of open source components. OPNFV will bring these elements together to create an open NFV platform for users and advance new products and services. We will work with our customers, our partners and everyone involved in the OPNFV project to deliver openness and superior performance in the Networked Society,” said Erik Ekudden, VP Technology Strategies, Ericsson.

HP
“With OPNFV, we are attempting to create a new approach to networking standardization,” said Prodip Sen, CTO, NFV Business Unit, HP. “Rather than relying on an extended standardization process followed by implementation, we are pursuing an iterative model, with an open source framework serving as the standardization mechanism. The shared implementation experience of users and vendors should foster interoperability and accelerate adoption and deployment of NFV. Our expertise in SDN and NFV, and our participation in other open source projects, will help us contribute significantly to this effort.”

IBM
“The networking industry is undergoing a major transformation, one in which software-defined networks and network function virtualization are opening up new opportunities for users and vendors alike,” said Inder Gopal, VP, Cloud Networking, IBM. “As a founding member of OPNFV, we look forward to working with other members to bring an industry ecosystem together that will accelerate this industry transformation.”

Huawei
“Huawei envisions that Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has the potential to enable the network of the future to be much more nimble, flexible, and scalable,” said Dr. Anthony C.K. Soong, IEEE Fellow and Chief Scientist from Huawei. “We look forward to building a healthy ecosystem and better explore the future together with our peers. As an enabler of this virtualization, OPNFV will become an important corner stone in the ICT industry. It will increase the rate of innovation, equip the industry for novel business models, and speed up the development of the ecosystem that will enrich our lives.”

Intel
“The continued momentum towards adopting server, cloud and virtualization technologies in service provider networks will bring many benefits including lower operating costs and faster deployment of new services. OPNFV will accelerate NFV and SDN solutions in the market that are interoperable and scalable and Intel is looking forward to contributing to this important project,” said Sandra Rivera, Senior Director of Market Development, Intel Corporation.

Juniper Networks
“The time is right for OPNFV, as it brings the industry together to build a common platform to drive consistency and adoption of new technologies in order to enable faster service creation. This will not only create very real opportunities for vendors and service providers, but ultimately yield greater benefits to end customers,” said Paul Obsitnik, vice president, Service Provider Marketing at Juniper Networks. “Our commitment to open standards is in our DNA and is the foundation for co-creation and driving innovation. We look forward to achieving breakthrough results with our industry peers.”

NEC
NEC has long prioritized open source and collaborative development for ICT platforms to enable the introduction of innovative new services at higher speed and lower cost,” said Atsuo Kawamura, Senior Vice President, NEC. “NEC will drive OPNFV to develop a common platform for best-of-breed, multivendor NFV applications, integrated by advanced orchestration solutions, to enable operators’ profitable growth. NEC’s carrier solutions will adopt OPNFV to offer market leading NFV applications and services.”

Nokia Networks
“With OPNFV we are building the foundation for agility and flexibility in NFV and SDN solutions,” says Henri Tervonen, Head of Mobile Broadband Architecture, Nokia Networks. “We are committed to being hardware and cloud stack agnostic, and OPNFV is a part of delivering on that commitment.”

NTT DOCOMO
“OPNFV is an unique initiative which brings all these elements together, where Operators, Service Providers, Vendors and the Open Source community join hands together to deliver an open reference platform for NFV,” said Dr. Hiroshi Nakamura, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Core Network Development Department, NTT DOCOMO, Inc. “DOCOMO has been at the forefront of faster service rollout and cutting-edge network platform deployment. DOCOMO will lead the OPNFV to create the foundation of emerging NFV ecosystem across industries.”

Red Hat
“Red Hat understands the value of open source software and collaboration and is prioritizing innovation to enable the next-generation of cloud-based services,” said Chris Wright, Technical Director, SDN and NFV, Red Hat. “We’re pleased to join the OPNFV Project to help move forward the needed standards and code to enable service providers to offer a new level of services on their networks.”

Telecom Italia
“OPNFV will provide a needed platform for integration and testing of key NFV features for operators,” said Luigi Licciardi, head of standards, IPR and Research Coordination, Telecom Italia. “We’re excite to be able to actively participate and contribute to this important work that will benefit the industry overall.”

Vodafone
“It’s important to Vodafone to advance the state-of-the-art of telecommunications networks,” said Luke Ibbetson, Group R&D Director, Vodafone. “OPNFV gives us a vehicle to do just that.”

About Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)
Open Platform for NFV is a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using NFV. It brings together service providers, vendors and users to collaborate in an open forum on advancing the state-of-the-art in NFV. For more information, please visit: http://www.opnfv.org.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at http://www.linuxfoundation.org .

Sep 30

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Open Source Drives Innovation in Another Multi-Billion Dollar Market: World’s Largest Carriers, Vendors to Bring Virtualization

By opnfv Blog

Guest post from Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation today is announcing a new Collaborative Project, Open Platform for NFV, or OPNFV. It involves nearly 40 companies and has largely been driven by end users like AT&T, China Mobile, NTT DOCOMO, Telecom Italia and Vodafone, among others. Together this community aims to build a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform to accelerate Network Function Virtualization.

NFV is part of the industry’s transition to networks that are increasingly defined and run by software. It represents an unprecedented opportunity for carriers and enterprises in different sectors (telecom, financial services and more) to deliver new services and solutions to their customers much faster. Reports also indicate the market for NFV will grow rapidly over the next five years, which gives cloud service providers more opportunity than ever to play an important role in telecom. As the networking market undergoes this massive transition, open source software and collaborative development give companies the essential building blocks for that future.

This trend towards software dominance is not just happening in networking but throughout the technology industry. Software is defining the cloud, the mobile experience, storage, networking, and more. In fact, software is growing so much that it simply can’t be built by any one company any more. Open source and collaborative development are proven models for building better, cheaper software faster. It’s natural that companies and individuals are looking to organizations like Linux Foundation and communities like Linux to help them address this trend with best practices established by some of the world’s leading developers.

In fact, OPNFV is similar to Linux distributions in that it will work with “upstream” open source projects like OpenDaylight, OpenStack, Open vSwitch and the Linux kernel to integrate and test existing code. The result will be the best possible reference platform for NFV. We expect contributions to this project to come in many forms, ranging from code development to performance testing resources and documentation. We also expect, like Linux, that OPNFV will provide a platform on top of which a wide variety of offerings will be made available.

OPNFV joins other Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects like OpenDaylight (networking), AllSeen Alliance (Internet of Things), OpenBEL (life sciences) and Yocto Project (embedded development). It’s clear that open source and collaborative development are pervasive across industries and are the core ingredients for a future defined by software.

I hope you’ll join me in Dusseldorf Oct 13-15, where I’ll be talking more about this during my keynotes at both LinuxCon/CloudOpen Europe and SDN and OpenFlow World Congress.

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, Linux Foundation

This article was originally published on the Linux Foundation Blog.

Sep 30

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Enabling the Transition: Introducing OPNFV, an integral step towards NFV adoption

By opnfv Blog

Guest post by Marc Cohn, Market Development, Ciena Corporation

Next month marks the two year anniversary of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), which has taken the industry by storm and transformed the relationship between major operators and standards.

As we plan to return to Germany next month for the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress, the event where the landmark NFV White Paper was published in October, 2012 and the ETSI NFV initiative was announced, many in the NFV community are reexamining a fundamental goal that has guided NFV from the beginning- Openness.

Openness means many things to different communities, as Matt Palmer summarized in his series: Defining Openness for Open SDN and NFV: A Primer for Network Operators.

As the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ETSI NFV ISG) rapidly transitions from requirements to implementation, an important element in the openness mix is open source software.

This week the Linux Foundation announced the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV), an open source software initiative intended to accelerate industry adoption of NFV. OPNFV intends to develop an ‘Open NFV Reference Platform’ that explicitly leverages a number of ‘upstream’ open source initiatives to catalyze and accelerate the development.

OPNFV Goals
OPNFV is a new open source software initiative that aims to drive the evolution of NFV, through a reference platform in accordance with the ETSI NFV ISG Architectural Framework.

Over-arching objectives include:

Develop an integrated and tested open source platform that can be used to investigate and demonstrate core NFV functionality
Proactive participation of leading end-users to validate that OPNFV releases address participating operators’ needs
Influence and contribute to the relevant open source projects that will be adopted in the OPNFV reference platform
Establish an open ecosystem for NFV solutions based on open standards and open source software
Promote OPNFV as the preferred open reference platform to avoid unnecessary and costly duplication of effort

Figure 1 below illustrates the initial scope of the OPNFV initiative, relative to the ETSI NFV ISG Architectural Framework (specified in GS NFV 002). Specifics on the scope of the development projects are now being discussed in the OPNFV technical community. Like many other Open Source Software projects, released software will be made available through a common Apache License, Version 2.0.

Figure 1- NFV Architecture Framework indicating OPNFV scope (in red)

As a starting point, the OPNFV open reference platform could adopt several Cloud and SDN open source software projects, along with select proprietary components, including:

SDN Controller framework- OpenDaylight
Virtualization infrastructure- KVM, ESXi, and Xen hypervisors
Automation and Virtual Infrastructure Manager- OpenStack, CloudStack, and vCenter
Virtualization networking- Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and the Open Data Plane project

Over time, the list of open source projects adopted by OPNFV is expected to grow, as the scope of OPNFV steadily expands. From the outset, the OPNFV community intends to actively contribute to each of these projects to ensure they address NFV requirements and use cases.

How OPNFV relates to the ETSI NFV ISG
OPNFV has been established as an autonomous open source project by the Linux Foundation, similar to OpenDaylight, including a distinct governance, project leadership, and oversight structure. All technical decisions will be made by the OPNFV leadership, but will be influenced by the ETSI NFV ISG requirements and use cases, which have already been endorsed by the majority of the world’s network operators.

The OPNFV and the ETSI NFV ISG organizations are completely independent. To date, OPNFV and the ETSI NFV ISG have not entered into a formal arrangement. However, there appears to be a strong intent by both leadership teams to maintain a loosely coupled relationship that can be nimble and effective, similar to the ETSI NFV ISG relationship with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). The ETSI NFV ISG and ONF leadership collaborated for months before entering into a formal agreement in April, 2014.

Dr. Steven Wright (AT&T), the newly elected Chairman of the NFV ISG commented: “I congratulate the OPFNV founders on the formation of this new open source community supporting NFV. The NFV ISG’s mission is to facilitate the industry transformation and development of an open, interoperable, ecosystem through specification, implementation and deployment experience. The ISG recognizes the value of open source implementations to converge industry requirements and facilitate the development of the NFV ecosystem. I look forward to the future releases of the integrated open source infrastructure platform from OPNFV.”

The Linux Foundation’s Executive Director Jim Zemlin indicated “From the beginning, we have been encouraged by the strong industry support for OPNFV spanning the major operators, vendors, and individual contributors. We feel especially confident, considering the extremely well-defined NFV use cases and architecture framework that guide the OPNFV baseline. We anticipate a close working relationship with the ETSI NFV ISG, other open source projects and the entire NFV community.”

Neela Jacques, Executive Director of OpenDaylight stated ‘The introduction of OPNFV is a critical step towards the long-term success for NFV. Open Source software projects have become increasingly important for all networking initiatives. We are excited about OPNFV’s decision to adopt OpenDaylight, which also emphasizes the importance of SDN as an enabler for NFV. Congratulations to each of the founding companies, many of whom already participate in ODL as well.”

Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of OpenStack commented ‘OpenStack is already addressing the growing needs for the NFV community, starting with our upcoming release next month’. Our congratulations to each founding member of OPNFV for their commitment to facilitate new cloud services and software, a fundamental objective of OpenStack as well. We are excited that OpenStack was selected for the OPNFV baseline, and look forward to OPNFV’s contributions moving forward.’

Unlike many open source projects, OPNFV was formed with substantive involvement from the stakeholders with the most to gain- the operators who anticipate deploying NFV over the long-term. OPNFV membership classes were formed to enable varying degrees of participation, including board representation for ‘Platinum Strategic End-User Members’. Among the founding operators for OPNFV include: AT&T, CableLabs, China Mobile, DOCOMO, Telecom Italia and Vodafone, among others.

Margaret Chiosi (AT&T) added “Industry response to the OPNFV has exceeded our expectations. Many of the initial OPNFV members are also active participants in the NFV ISG, which shows the industry is taking the next step – accelerating the implementation of NFV. The goal is to expand the user community to include users who may be more focused on implementation and software”.

Don Clarke (CableLabs), Chairman of the Network Operator Council indicated:
“Leading operators participating in the ETSI NFV ISG believe that open source software is a critical success factor for development of an open ecosystem for NFV. I applaud the formation of the OPNFV project, and look forward to close cooperation towards achieving our common goals.”

As NFV Phase 2 continues to gain momentum, OPNFV has the potential to play an increasingly important role, enabling an open platform for NFV investigations to showcase/demonstrate select NFV functionality. Open source software will undoubtedly take on greater significance for the ETSI NFV ISG. OPNFV will likely pioneer open source development in the future, by aligning with the key stakeholders (i.e., ETSI NFV ISG), while encouraging participation by network operators.

Ultimately, OPNFV aims to enable operators to focus on rapid delivery of differentiated services, and not be compelled to become enmeshed in the details of the underlying NFV Infrastructure.

-Marc Cohn, Market Development, Ciena Corporation

This article was originally published on SDN Central

https://www.sdncentral.com/education/nfv-insiders-perspective-part-7-introducing-opnfv-step-toward-nfv-adoption/2014/09/.