Tuesday, September 27, 2016

ONOS Project Enters 8th Release - Hummingbird

The ONOS Project, which develops an SDN control plane for service providers and enterprises, announced its eighth quarterly platform release: Hummingbird.

New Features in ONOS Hummingbird:

Southbound: Hummingbird expands ONOS to be able to configure and control legacy networks with additional support for Arista and Cisco devices. The Hummingbird release also includes Optical feature enhancements and improvements to OSPF and ISIS drivers. Numerous NETCONF enhancements in ONOS create support for many additional devices. In short, all these enhancements allow ONOS to support a variety of legacy devices to help service providers incrementally deploy SDN.

Northbound: Hummingbird rounds ONOS out with new features that improve interoperability and ways for applications to interact with the Northbound protocol through message bus integration (RabbitMQ from ADARA and Kafka from Calix), as well as add more flexibility for intent-based management.

Disruptive SDN: In support of disruptive SDN, ONOS continued to focus on scaling views for very large networks and making it easy for applications to be written to benefit from ONOS’ high availability primitives. Hummingbird brings major new features with additional distributed primitives, support for controller to controller peering and enhancements to the P4 driver support.

Legacy device support: In support of incremental SDN, Huawei brought in significant YANG modeling and management capabilities at both the Northbound and Southbound interfaces, as well as support for the IEEE Abstraction and Control of Traffic Engineered Networks (ACTN).

Commercial support: Hummingbird brings new commercial support for ONOS with Huawei’s announcement of the ONOS-based converged controller, “Agile Controller 3.0.”

Broad Set of Use Cases: Hummingbird’s new service offerings and other enhancements enable valuable use cases in the areas of Cloud and SDN. The vibrant ONOS community has already built use case applications upon ONOS with CORD, packet-optical, and SDN-IP peering, and is building new ones in the areas of dynamic configuration and provisioning, and traffic engineering.

“Hummingbird is the ideal platform to deliver the full SDN value proposition to service providers,” said Bill Snow, vice president of engineering, ON.Lab. “Hummingbird delivers important advancements not only in the core control functions, but also in support of automation and configuration of legacy and OpenFlow-enabled devices to serve the growing set of use cases being tackled by service providers today and into the future.”

https://wiki.onosproject.org/display/ONOS/Release+Model

China Mobile Joins Open Daylight Project

China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC) has joined the OpenDaylight project at the Silver level.

Recently, China Mobile released its commercial OpenDaylight-based datacenter SDN controller named “AERO,” currently in trial, and believed to be the first datacenter SDN controller developed by a telecom operator based in China, according to the company and the Linux Foundation. Additionally, CMCC initiated the “SPTN” project within OpenDaylight, which evolves the packet transport network (PTN) toward SDN.

China Mobile joins Tencent and Alibaba, also members of OpenDaylight, as part of a growing number of Chinese internet and communications companies that actively participate in open networking projects and leverage open source SDN to support their extreme scalability demands.

“I am pleased to see the OpenDaylight community growing so rapidly and on such a global scale,” said Neela Jacques, executive director of the OpenDaylight project. “China Mobile’s expanding contributions are beneficial to the OpenDaylight community, and their involvement is yet another example of the innovation happening in the Chinese market today. As Chinese telcos, enterprises and equipment manufacturers embrace open source, they’re enabling new solutions at a breathtaking pace.”

https://www.opendaylight.org

ETSI Announces NFV Release 2

ETSI’s Network Functions Virtualisation  (NFV) Industry Specification Group (ISG) announced the publication of NFV Release 2 specifications covering a wide set of functional areas, such as the management of virtualized resources, lifecycle management of both network services and virtualized network functions, network service fault/performance management, virtualized resource capacity management, etc.

NFV Release 2 incorporates 11 new group specifications, in addition to the many NFV specifications already published. These detail the various requirements, interface descriptions and information models enabling interoperability of solutions based on the ETSI NFV Architectural Framework.


“This represents another major step towards our objective of defining a comprehensive set of specifications that will facilitate the deployment of NFV throughout the telecommunication industry, with significant benefits being subsequently derived in many interrelated sectors,” states Telefonica’s Diego Lopez, the newly appointed Chairman of ETSI NFV ISG. “Through the collaborative efforts of all parties involved in the ETSI NFV ISG, we have been able to identify and define the required capabilities, following a practical approach that leverages proofs of concept to explore and demonstrate what was proposed. The combination of wide consensus and experimental evidence has led to NFV being recognized as a completely viable and highly valuable technology. This has allowed us to make progresses at a fast pace.”

“By drawing upon the combined merits of a well-defined standards structure and the support of the open source community, we have been able to accelerate the development process and ensure widespread interoperability,” Lopez continues. “I am therefore confident that the ETSI NFV Architectural Framework will be the foundation upon which future virtualization of the network is established - enabling cost effective allocation of resources and the rapid addition of new services, while still ensuring the highest degrees of security and reliability, as well as painless and seamless integration with existing infrastructure.”

http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_gs/NFV/001_099/002/01.02.01_60/gs_NFV002v010201p.pdf

ETSI’s NFV Group Publishes Phase 1 Specs


ETSI’s Network Functions Virtualisation  (NFV) Industry Specification Group (ISG) announced the publication of eleven specifications under phase 1 of its activity. The work includes an infrastructure overview, an updated architectural framework, and descriptions of the compute, hypervisor and network domains of the infrastructure. The new specifications also cover management and orchestration, security and trust, resilience and service quality...

Wave2Wave Simplifies Data Center Cabling with QSFP28 Copper DAC

Wave2Wave introduced a QSFP28 copper-based, direct attached cable (DAC) for data centers.

The new product, which expands the company's EDGE cable fabric family, simplifies the cabling for spine-and-leaf, data center infrastructure, and server rack-and-stack environments. The QSFP28 DAC offering supports higher data rates – now up to 100Gbp/s – with near-zero wire speed latency and no power consumption, reducing data center energy use, CAPEX and OPEX.

Key features:

  • Four-channel, full duplex passive copper cable transceiver
  • Up to 25 Gbps per channel, maximum aggregate data rate of 100 Gbps
  • Conforms to SFF-8665
  • IEEE 802.3bg 100 GEBASE-CR4
  • Copper link length up to 3 meters
  • Power supply of +3.3V
  • Low crosstalk
  • I2C-based two-wire serial interface for EEPROM signature that can be customized


“The newest addition to the EDGE cable fabric family, QSFP28 DAC, cuts down time to deployment in the data center significantly,” said David Wang, founder and chief executive officer of Wave2Wave. “With these turn-key offerings, operators and integrators can build a spine-and-leaf cluster or a server rack with hundreds of cables within an hour – an undertaking that would typically take days to build otherwise.”

http://www.wave-2-wave.com/

Wave2Wave Launches Robotic Optical Switches for Data Centers


Wave2Wave Solution introduced a line of robotic optical switches for automating physical fiber connections in high-density data centers. The Wave2Wave "ROME" Robotic Optical Management Engine platforms, which are offered in three sizes, enable full control of physical fiber connections, allowing changes to be made automatically, remotely, quickly, and without manual intervention.  The robotic systems are designed in 19-inch chassis. The company...

Docker Announces Commercial Partnership With Microsoft

Docker has formed a commercial partnership with Microsoft to enable enterprises to run Commercially Supported Docker Engine (CS Docker Engine) and Docker Datacenter with Windows Server 2016.

As part of a new agreement, Microsoft and Docker will make the CS Docker Engine available to Windows Server 2016 customers at no additional cost. Docker Datacenter helps organizations manage heterogeneous environments of Windows and Linux workloads, running in both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure, such as Microsoft Azure.

As part of the commercial relationship, Microsoft will provide enterprise support options for CS Docker Engine, backed by Docker, Inc.

"Over the last two years, we have partnered with Docker, a leader in containerization, to bring the Docker platform to Windows Server as well as the Microsoft Azure cloud ecosystem,” said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Executive Vice President, Cloud + Enterprise. “With today’s announcement, we are deepening our commitment to creating an open platform, bringing together Windows Server and Linux to help developers and IT professionals deliver new levels of innovation.”

http://www.docker.com

New Spec for Audio over USB Type-C

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) announced a new USB Audio Device Class 3.0 specification to establish USB Audio over USB Type-C as the primary solution for all digital audio applications, including headsets, mobile devices, docking stations, gaming set-ups and VR solutions.

“USB is the simplest and most pervasive connector available today, making USB Type-C the logical choice for the future of digital audio,” said Jeff Ravencraft, USB-IF President and COO. “We encourage companies interested in adopting USB specifications to take advantage of USB-IF resources to reduce time-to-market and deliver reliable USB products.”

The USB Audio Device Class 3.0 specification makes it easier to support digital audio over USB, add capabilities to reduce power consumption and add support for new features such as hotword detection. It defines minimum interoperability requirements across analog and digital solutions to minimize user confusion when not all hosts or devices support audio consistently. USB Audio over USB Type-C™ allows OEMs to remove the 3.5mm analog audio jack, shaving up to a millimeter off product designs and reducing the number of connectors on a device. Fewer connectors will open the door for innovation in countless ways and make it easier to design waterproof or water-resistant devices.

http://www.usb.org

Cisco Cites Traction for cBR-8 Converged Broadband Access Platform

In a little over a year since launching its cBR-8 Converged Broadband Access Platform, Cisco said it has 100 service providers globally deploying the platform. The latest customer is Cablevision Argentina, which has more than 3.5 million video subscribers and 2.2 million broadband subscribers.

The cBR-8 leverages key technologies such as SDN, NFV and DOCISIS 3.1 to enable cable operators to offer Gigabit or multi-Gigabit services to their subscribers.

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/video/cbr-series-converged-broadband-routers/index.html