Open Network Featured Article

Working in an open environment is an ideal situation for developers. It not only provides portability across various platforms and control planes, it also ensures the environment is constantly getting attention from those who are building out capabilities. It’s these benefits that are driving the demand for new releases and continued innovations in this space.

A demonstrated example is that of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which recently announced the second release of Atrium, an open SDN (software-defined networking) software distribution. The non-profit organization is dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open SDN extended Atrium to the OpenDaylight platform.

Known as Atrium 2016/A, this release builds on Atrium 2015/A, the first open SDN software distribution released by the organization last June. This virtually integrated set of open source components work together to form a complete SDN stack for open networking. It is designed to facilitate the networking industry’s adoption of open SDN through the integration of established open source SDN software with critical connecting pieces.

“In this release of Atrium, the porting to OpenDaylight provides a large and vibrant community with a new vehicle for adopting open SDN,” said Bithika Khargharia, director of Product and Community Management for the ONF and principal architect of Solutions and Innovation at Extreme Networks (News - Alert), in a press release. “ONF is actively creating an ecosystem and the architecture needed to assist network operators to more easily build custom solutions and allow vendors to take advantage of common building blocks, reducing their development costs and improving interoperability.”

The incorporation of OpenDaylight into the Atrium router is the focus for this second release. The router is built on the OpenDaylight framework, controlling OpenFlow hardware switches with Quagga’s open source implementation of the Border Gateway (News - Alert) Protocol. The router will work easily across multiple OpenFlow v1.3 hardware pipelines to ensure seamless open networking and optimal performance.

The overarching goal of both Atrium releases is to enable an environment where the router is created through the integration application, a network control plane and multiple instances of open networking forwarding planes. The integrated packet is then easily downloaded and deployed, enabling developers to gain benefit almost immediately.

In an environment where companies can’t afford to sit back and wait when it comes to innovation, the demand for open networking continues to grow. With this latest release, developers have access to even better capabilities, as well as the opportunity to leverage the benefits available with OpenDaylight.