Open Network Featured Article

A month from tomorrow will mark a year since Open Networking Foundation announced its plans to merge with ON (News - Alert).Lab. And last week the organizations said they have now officially tied the knot. The new and improved ONF also said that Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs and CTO, will chair the ONF Board. ONF welcomed Turk Telekom (News - Alert) as a new operator partner. And the group said it has established new open source projects and changed its membership structure.

“With the combination of ONF and ON.Lab, we are shaping the future of networking by bringing standards and open source efforts under a single umbrella,” Guru Parulkar, who founded and had been executive director of ON.Lab and is now the ONF’s executive director, said when the merger was announced. “This will build real synergy between the two – letting open source development and deployment guide standards development. We believe that standards based on widely adopted open source projects such as ODL, ONOS, OPNFV, and CORD can be more widely and easily implemented within the industry. This emphasis on open source, supported by ON.Lab’s successful software development, will guide ONF’s ongoing standards work, including updates to OpenFlow.”

CORD and ONOS have been the two major projects on which ONF has been focused.

The main goals of the CORD project is to create a general-purpose platform capable of delivering a wide range of innovative services for mobile, residential, and enterprise subscribers. Heavy Reading expects most communications service providers to be using CORD in some fashion by 2020, and nearly 40 percent of all end users (residential, wireless and enterprise) to be using CORD-powered services by mid-2021. 

ONOS is an open source SDN controller. And it enables operators to build carrier-grade solutions while enjoying the economics of white box merchant silicon hardware.

The ONF adds to that new projects related to Open Disaggregated Transport Network, Open Information Model and Tooling, and Open Transport Configuration & Control. ODTN leverages the economics of whitebox disaggregated optical networking components and SDN control to build open source solutions for carrier backbones. OIM&T is focused on enabling the modernization of network management through automation, Netconf, and Yang. And OTC&C aims to build common and software-based configuration and control interfaces for transport networks.