Open Network Featured Article

Years back, when Marc Andressen so boldly declared that software is eating the world, many didn’t realize how soon software would finish its meal. For network functions, software-defined solutions are setting the pace, and as we see a more open approach to networking, the pieces are coming together.

Today, Mirantis, a company that provides managed open cloud solutions, announced it joined the Open Network Automation (News - Alert) Platform project (ONAP) with the aim of aiding the adoption of open standards for NFV and SDN automation.

The Mirantis Cloud Platform is cutting edge in terms of enabling NFV deployments. The platform offers DPDX, SR-IOV, CPU pinning and NUMA to accelerate dataplane performance and address NFV requirements at scale.

“SDN/NFV is the future of telecom, and is actually rapidly becoming the present with companies like Telstra (News - Alert) already using SDN/NFV in production,” said Randy DeFauw, senior director of Product Management. “ONAP is doing important work bringing the industry together to support open standards in SDN/NFV.”

ONAP is the product of a merger between ERCOMP and OPEN (News - Alert)-O, bringing together two of the largest bodies working on open source projects and initiatives.

While its approach is a bit different than others, the operations-centric model means open infrastructure is delivered continuously, working off of an operations SLA, which is either offered as a managed service or by the customer themselves. In pioneering this approach, it shifts the software update cycle a bit, from once or twice a year, to weekly, unobtrusive incremental updates.

Mirantis is a known entity in the networking space, touting customers like Telstra, China Mobile, Vodafone (News - Alert) and AT&T; today’s announcement should not only cement Mirantis on the tip of the NFV innovation  spear, but further reinforce the fact the future will be software-defined.

It’s becoming abundantly clear that software has no intention of stepping away from its feast, which is a good thing. Open networking in today’s high performance, flexible and at scale world requires a special kind of solution capable of supporting the growing laundry list of network demands.

Go software-defined, or go home.