Open Network Featured Article

The Open Network Automation Platform Project released its first platform. It’s called Amsterdam. And it provides a unified architecture for service automation and orchestration.

"Amsterdam represents significant progress for both the ONAP community and the greater open source networking ecosystem at large," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager for networking and orchestration at The Linux Foundation (News - Alert). "By bringing together member resources, Amsterdam is the first step toward realization of a globally shared architecture and implementation for network automation, based on open source and open standards. It's exciting to see a new era of industry collaboration and architectural convergence – via a healthy, rapidly diversifying ecosystem – begin to take shape with the release of ONAP Amsterdam."

ONAP is a Linux Foundation effort. It was created with the merger of ECOMP and the Open Orchestrator Project, or OPEN-O.   

AT&T has been the driving force behind ECOMP, which stands for enhanced control, orchestration, management, and policy platform. Bell Canada (News - Alert) and Orange have also been testing the software. And suppliers Amdocs, Brocade, Ericsson (News - Alert), Huawei, IBM, Intel, and Metaswitch have also been involved with ECOMP.

OPEN-O, meanwhile, is the open source orchestration project that the Linux Foundation backed originally. Release 1.0 of OPEN-O was announced in November of 2016. OPEN-O members included China Mobile (News - Alert), China Telecom, Hong Kong Telecom, and vendors Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Huawei, Intel, and ZTE, as well as Canonical, Cloudbase Solutions, InfoBlox, Raisecom, and Red Hat (News - Alert).

Including code from both ECOMP and OPEN-O, Amsterdam helps expedite the creation and implementation of new services using components from different suppliers. It allows for end-to-end troubleshooting and monitoring, and can support service level agreements. And it can work with both physical and/or virtualized network elements.

 “Amsterdam provides verified blueprints for two initial use cases, with more to be developed and tested in future releases,” the group explains. “This includes VoLTE, which allows voice to be unified onto IP networks. By virtualizing the core network, ONAP is used to design, deploy, monitor, and manage the lifecycle of a complex end-to-end VoLTE service. The second use case is residential vCPE.”