Thursday, December 4, 2014

ON.Lab Releases its Open Source SDN Network Operating System

The Open Networking Lab, ON.Lab, and leading service providers, including AT&T, NTT Communications and key vendors, are releasing an open source SDN Open Network Operating System (ONOS) for Service Providers that enables agile service creation and deployment at scale on any hardware, including white boxes.

ONOS will be available for download starting later today, Friday, Dec. 5.

ONOS features a highly available, scalable SDN control plane featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control, and service applications across mission critical networks. ON.Lab said it was architected to provide high availability, scalability, performance and rich northbound and southbound abstractions.

Key features of the first ONOS release include:

  • A clean-slate, clustered, modular architecture with distributed core for high availability, performance and scale-out
  • Application Intent Framework providing a high-level policy driven, network-agnostic programmatic abstraction and interface
  • Pluggable southbound for supporting a diversity of devices and protocols.
  • OpenFlow 1.3 and 1.0 support
  • GUI for visualization, visibility and configuration
  • Apache Karaf for modularity, customization and extensibility
  • Service provider use cases to demonstrate capabilities such as—
  • Multilayer SDN control for packet-optical networks
  • SDN-IP for seamless peering of SDN islands within legacy networks
  • Proof of concept Network Functions as a Service (NFaaS)
  • SDN-based WAN control with segment routing (developed with ONF) 
  • Developer and end-user on-boarding resources
  • QA infrastructure and processes
  • Black Duck audit certifying usability and cleanliness of open source ONOS codebase

"The ONOS project partnership was formed with a unique blend of service providers, vendors and ON.Lab to accelerate the adoption of SDN by providers," said Bill Snow, vice president of Engineering at ON.Lab. "A highly available and scalable open source SDN OS platform will help transform service provider networks by delivering significant CapEx and OpEx savings and enabling new revenue-generating services. The first release of ONOS is the start of the journey towards service provider network transformation."

"2015 will be a pivotal year for the open source ONOS project," said Guru Parulkar, executive director of ON.Lab. "We will grow the ONOS community, harden and enhance the current architecture and code, and focus all of our efforts on accelerating SDN adoption in service provider and mission critical networks."

Founding members who are funding and contributing to the ONOS initiative include AT&T, NTT Communications, Ciena, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, NEC; and members who are collaborating and contributing to ONOS include Infoblox, SRI, Internet2, CNIT and Create-Net.

http://onosproject.org