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OPNFV Delivers Second Release of Open Source Network Functions Virtualization Platform

By March 1, 2016November 28th, 2016Announcements

Community delivers lab-ready platform that integrates and tests key NFV features at end-to-end system level

SAN FRANCISCO, March 1, 2016 — The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced the availability of OPNFV Brahmaputra, the community’s second platform release. With the delivery of rich platform-level testing of NFV functionality and use cases, Brahmaputra is OPNFV’s first full experience with a massively parallel simultaneous release process. Brahmaputra demonstrates the ability to collaborate with upstream communities on feature development, address multiple technology components across the ecosystem and advance stability, performance, automation and hardened features.

OPNFV facilitates collaboration among the 165+ developers from network operators, solution providers and vendors who focus on integration, deployment and testing of upstream components to address NFV needs. Brahmaputra’s rigorous integration process pulled the latest code from upstream communities—including OpenStack, OpenDaylight, OpenContrail, ONOS and ETSI—while more than 30 accepted projects contributed new capabilities, specifications and community resources.

“Building on the foundation of Arno, the OPNFV community worked tirelessly to integrate and combine components from multiple communities to deliver Brahmaputra, which brings end-to-end feature realization,” said Chris Price, technical steering committee chair, OPNFV and Open Source Manager for SDN, Cloud & NFV, Ericsson. “The impact is substantial; we’ve now established methodologies and mechanisms for further cross-project and feature development.”

Key enhancements in OPNFV Brahmaputra include:

  •  Hardened feature enhancements.
    •  Layer 3 VPN instantiation and configuration
    • Initial support for IPv6 deployment and testing in IPv6 environments,
    • Improved fault detection and recovery capabilities via work in OpenStack Neutron and Ceilometer as well as collaborative development work with DPDK
    •  Initial Service Function Chaining capabilities via OpenDaylight Beryllium
    • Basic resource reservation via a shim layer on top of OpenStack
    •  Enhancements in performance and throughput via data plane acceleration and NFV-focused enhancements in OVS and KVM
  • Enhanced testing capabilities. Extending the suite of functional tests developed in Arno, Brahmaputra adds system-level testing and multiple performance testing frameworks and methodologies. The Yardstick Project implements system-level validation with baseline testing requirements as outlined in the ETSI TST 001 spec. Additional improvements include detailed vSwitch performance characterization, bottoms-up system performance benchmarking, and the implementation of a performance bottleneck-focused testing framework.
  •  Infrastructure and testing environment advancements. In addition to the bare metal lab hosted by the Linux Foundation, community Pharos labs were used to release validation for Brahmaputra. Additionally, OPNFV’s Jenkins-based continuous integration and continuous deployment toolchain has made great strides in automating all integration and deployment scenarios and associated testing frameworks.
  •  Deployment and integration enhancements. Brahmaputra contains an increased number of components and scenarios, including support for additional SDN controllers and installers, such as OpenStack Liberty and OpenDaylight Beryllium, which can be used to build the platform.

“The strength of any open source project depends on the community developing it,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “With an entire industry involved in the development of NFV, we’re seeing more collaboration among key stakeholders across the ecosystem. The strides we made in Brahmaputra create a framework for even more developers to come together and make progress in the journey to NFV.”

Brahmaputra will deliver the entire set of deployment scenarios incrementally, with additional scenarios becoming available in a set of monthly releases as they achieve stability.

OPNFV is also planning its first plugfest which will take place the week of May 9th, 2016 at the CableLabs headquarters in Louisville, CO. The plugfest will give the industry the opportunity to collaborate and test interoperability of different products with the Brahmaputra release.

Comments from upstream open source projects and standards organizations:

ETSI

“We congratulate the OPNFV Community on the Brahmaputra release of their NFV Reference Platform. The system level validation testing in the YardStick Project using requirements from ETSI’s DGS NFV TST 001 is an important step towards establishing and maintaining interoperability,” said Steven Wright, Chair ETSI NFV ISG. We’re looking forward to further collaborative efforts to enable an ecosystem supporting VNFs.”

ONOS

“We are pleased to see integration of ONOS Emu as a controller option in the OPNFV Brahmaputra release,” said Bill Snow, VP of Engineering with the Open Networking Laboratory (ON.Lab). “We congratulate OPNFV on this major release and look forward to continuing open collaboration with our upstream project to provide the SDN network control needed for future VNFaaS, NFV management and orchestration capabilities.”

OpenContrail

“We are excited to be a part of the journey with OPNFV by integrating our OpenContrail SDN solution into Brahmaputra, said Parantap Lahiri, senior director of engineering, Juniper Networks. “Based on the principles of open architecture and collaboration, integrating OpenContrail’s key features—such as IPv6 and VNF service chaining—into Brahmaputra further strengthens the OPNFV Project, enhancing our users’ NFV services and experiences. We look forward to continuing this journey as a part of the OPNFV family.”

OpenDaylight

“It’s great to see that in just 18 months, OPNFV has gone from idea to reality, playing a major role in accelerating the development of open source NFV within the industry,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight. “Our community has worked closely with and contributed significantly to OPNFV’s Brahmaputra release. Brahmaputra significantly leverages the newest OpenDaylight platform features from our recently released Beryllium release. We congratulate the OPNFV community on very important release and look forward to continuing to support their success.”

OpenStack

“The OPNFV Brahmaputra release delivers on the strong collaboration between the OpenStack and OPNFV communities,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, OpenStack Foundation. “In addition to upgrading to Liberty, the latest OpenStack release, you’ll see additional OpenStack features and projects incorporated into Brahmaputra, further accelerating the areas of networking, IPv6, Service Function Chaining, monitoring, fault management, and installation options, among others. We’re looking forward to combined efforts toward enhancing the integrated open source NFV platform.”

Information about OPNFV Brahmaputra is available here: https://www.opnfv.org/brahmaputra.

To learn more about OPNFV Brahmaputra, or for information on how to participate in the OPNFV project, visit: https://www.opnfv.org/

About Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)

Open Platform for NFV is a carrier-grade, integrated, open source flexible 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 project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation projects harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org

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Additional Resources

Media Inquires
Jill Lovato
OPNFV Project
pr@opnfv.org