Open Network Featured Article

Windstream this week announced its membership to the Open Network Automation (News - Alert) Platform Project. The communication services provider says this move demonstrates its commitment to the open source community and technologies like network functions virtualization and software-defined networking.

The Open Network Automation Platform Project, or ONAP, was formed earlier this year when ECOMP and the Open Orchestrator Project (or OPEN-O) decided to merge their efforts.

AT&T (News - Alert), Amdocs, Bell Canada, Cisco, China Telecom, China Mobile, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Huawei, IBM (News - Alert), Intel, Nokia, Orange, VMware, Tech Mahindra, and ZTE are the founding members of ONAP. ARM, BOCO Inter-Telecom, Cloudbase Solutions, Canonical, China Unicom, Metaswitch, Raisecom – and now Windstream – are also involved.

ECOMP stands for enhanced control, orchestration, management, and policy platform. It was designed to help enable network operators to automate configuration and management of their networks, implement master service orchestration, do rapid service design, and have a single view of both physical and virtual network assets and services. The release of ECOMP as open source was announced by AT&T, its champion, earlier this year.

As for OPEN-O, that was an open source orchestration project that the Linux Foundation (News - Alert) had been backing. Release 1.0 of OPEN-O was announced in November. And OPEN-O members included China Mobile, China Telecom, Hong Kong Telecom, and vendors Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Huawei, Intel, and ZTE (News - Alert), as well as Canonical, Cloudbase Solutions, InfoBlox, Raisecom, and Red Hat.

In addition to its new membership to ONAP, Windstream recently launched can SDN-based, on-demand optical wavelength service called SDNow Waves. This offering was designed to cater to organizations in the digital media, banking, and similar verticals that require high speed transport between major data centers and want it available quickly.

Windstream’s Ciena Blue Planet announcement last year was Windstream’s first foray into multi-vendor service orchestration. However, that was a prototype effort. SDNow represents Windstream’s commercial launch of SDN-based services.