ECOMP and OPEN-O to Become ONAP

The open source ECOMP project, which AT&T recently turned over to the Linux Foundation, and Open Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O), which is also managed by the Linux Foundation, will be merged to create the new Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project.

ONAP will allow end users to automate, design, orchestrate, and manage services and virtual functions. Its goal is to provide a harmonized and comprehensive framework for real-time, policy-driven software automation of virtual network functions that will enable software, network, IT and cloud providers and developers to rapidly create new services.

The Linux Foundation said that by consolidating member resources, ONAP is well positioned to deliver a unified architecture and implementation, with an open standards upstream focus, faster than any one project could on its own.

Founding Platinum members of ONAP include Amdocs, AT&T, Bell Canada, China Mobile, China Telecom, Cisco, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Orange, Tech Mahindra, VMware and ZTE. Silver members of ONAP are ARM, BOCO Inter-Telecom, Canonical, China Unicom, Cloudbase Solutions, Metaswitch and Raisecom.

“By combining two of the largest open source networking initiatives, the community is able to take advantage of the best architectural components of both projects,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation. “We’re excited to see the industry coalesce around ONAP with this unprecedented merger. Such a broad effort and investment will expedite our vision to deliver an open platform for network automation.”

The Linux Foundation will establish a governance and membership structure for ONAP to nurture a vibrant technical community.

“AT&T is excited to be working with a larger team on the future, open source network operating system for SDN automation. Creating a combined team of the initial open source ECOMP members with existing OPEN-O members bodes well for the project’s success. I want to thank the people at CMCC and Huawei, along with Jim Zemlin and Arpit Joshipura at The Linux Foundation who worked so hard with us to make this happen. We expect more consolidation in this space, and we expect many more service providers and other technology leaders to join us in this important work, which benefits the entire industry,” stated Chris Rice, SVP of Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design at AT&T.

“It is well accepted that SDN/NFV plays a key role to the carrier transformation, where automation of management and orchestration is one of the most critical enablers. Hence China Mobile has long been investing resources in the orchestrator development, and launched OPEN-O open source project with partners. In order to cohere efforts, to avoid fragmentation, and to accelerate the transformation of operators, China Mobile, AT&T and The Linux Foundation, finally reached consensus after several rounds of discussion. We are pleased to embrace the birth of the new project ONAP. It is our firm belief that, as the world's two largest telecom operators, the close collaboration in ONAP between China Mobile and AT&T, will accelerate the carrier network evolution with a strong impact on the industry globally. We sincerely hope that more industry partners would join hands with us in ONAP to promote industrial prosperity,” stated Madam Yang Zhiqiang, Deputy General Manager, China Mobile Research Institute.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org

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Previewing M-CORD Demo at #MWC2017

M-CORD is maturing very quickly and becoming the platform of choice for 5G research and trials, says Guru Parulkar, Executive Director of ON.Lab.

This video previews the upcoming M-CORD demos and announcements at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona.

See the demos in Hall 5, Booth 5i61

https://youtu.be/eNjW58CosIU

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Telefonica to Divest up to 40% of Infrastructure Operations to KKR for Euro 1.275B

Telefónica announced it has reached an agreement with global investment firm KKR Group for the sale of up to a 40% stake of Telxius Telecom, its global telecommunications infrastructure
company, for a total of Euro 1,275 million, or Euro 12.75 per share.

Under the agreement, which is subject to regulatory approvals, Telefónica and KKR plan to partner to develop and expand the global telecom infrastructure operation, including through the development of new infrastructure projects.

Telefónica's infrastructure arm Telxius, established in February 2016, owns and operates a portfolio comprising nearly 16,000 telecom towers in five countries and manages an international network with around 65,000 km of submarine optical cable, including around 31,000 km owned by Telxius. The Telxius-owned network includes SAM-1 linking the U.S., Central and South America, PCCS (Pacific Caribbean Cable System) and Unisur, which connects Uruguay and Argentina.

In addition, it is currently deploying BRUSA, linking Brazil, Puerto Rico and the U.S., and MAREA linking the U.S. and Europe in partnership with Google and Facebook, with both cable systems due to be operational in 2018.

On completion of the proposed deal, Telefonica will remain the anchor client for Telxius' tower and cable businesses, and will retain a majority stake and operational control of the business and continue to consolidate it into its accounts. The sale is part of Telefonica's strategy designed to optimise its asset portfolio and allocation of capital, and complements its plan for organic debt reductions.

Telefónica noted that the proposed agreement with KKR implies an enterprise value of Euro 3,678 million for Telxius, or 11.4 times its 2017 EBITDA, and confirms the valuation indicated for Telxius in the offering memorandum for its attempted initial public offering as announced in September, but subsequently withdrawn in November. At that time, the indicative price range for the same stake was between Euro 12 and 15 per share. The proposed transaction with KKR values Telxius's equity at Euro 3,188 million (Euro 12.75 a share).

The agreement includes the initial acquisition by KKR of 62 million of shares (24.8% of the total shares) of Telxius for a total of Euro 790 million, with the option to acquire and sell an additional 38 million shares (15.2% of the total shares) for a minimum of Euro 485 million. Such options are related to a call option, exercisable by KKR and a put option, exercisable by Telefónica upon maturity of the call option.

Telefónica stated that the closing of the transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and that the window to exercise these options is in the fourth quarter of 2017, provided the required regulatory approvals have been received.

http://www.telefonica.es

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Radisys Delivers FlowEngine TDE-2000 for SDN + NFV

Radisys announced the delivery of its FlowEngine TDE-2000 carrier-grade open network switch for SDN and NFV.

Radisys said its new 1-RU FlowEngine TDE-2000 platform delivers robust Layer 2 through 5 traffic classification and distribution with very high throughput and low latency. The platform is the new flagship offering in Radisys’ FlowEngine TDE portfolio, leveraging programmable network processors which makes it easy to add new features moving forward. FlowEngine TDE-2000 is designed to open standards, and brings together switching, load balancing, security and routing functionality under open policy control. The FlowEngine TDE-2000 also enables Service Function Chaining (SFC) functionality for distribution of traffic flows through a programmable sequence of virtualized network functions (VNFs).

“As service providers migrate from legacy networks to new virtualized telco data centers, they require a programmable, flexible and scalable traffic distribution platform that meets price/performance targets,” said Bryan Sadowski, vice president, FlowEngine and DCEngine, Radisys. “Our FlowEngine TDE-2000 delivers the highest density in the market in a 1RU platform and is readily deployable in multiple architectures as a standalone switch, Leaf/ToR, or Spine/EOR switching fabrics. The FlowEngine TDE-2000 also can be deployed as an NFVI solution in our DCEngine platform. The powerful combination of the TDE-2000 pre-integrated with our updated FlowEngine software enables our customers to accelerate their SDN and NFV deployments.”

“When Radisys launched its FlowEngine TDE portfolio, we reviewed how the platform met 16 network virtualization requirements very well. The Radisys FlowEngine TDE platform rapidly classifies flows and forwards them based on intelligent policies applied by the SDN orchestration while load balancing packets for the specified applications and network services to mitigate network bottlenecks,” noted Sue Rudd, Director Service Provider Analysis, Strategy Analytics. See complimentary summary ‘Reduce NFV Risk - Pursue Network Virtualization.’ She continued “The new FlowEngine TDE-2000 gives communications service providers a new compact high performance network platform for distributing NFV, 5G and IoT traffic across their virtualized networks.”

Key product highlights include:

• OpenFlow interface for flexible integration with SDN orchestrators including OpenDaylight and ONOS controllers for support of multiple architectures
• Supports control planes and interfaces based on REST/NETCONF/YANG and is designed to support LinuxTC (Traffic Control)
• Delivers Layer 2-5 processing with up to 600 Gbps of advanced packet processing with configurations up to 20 x 100 Gbps ports.
• Incorporates programmable network processors, including multiple Mellanox NPS programmable network processors and Broadcom Tomahawk for up to 2 Tbps L2/L3 performance
• Provides open standard Service Function Chaining with Network Service Headers (NSH)
• Supports up to 50 million flow table entries including subscriber match tables and IP forwarding rules
• Network security with hardware-based encryption/decryption including VNFs with SFC
• Network Tap functionality including open standard IPFIX
• OpenDaylight controller support including Boron release
• ONOS controller support including GoldenEye and Hummingbird releases
• OCP ONIE support

http://www.radisys.com

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OpenStack's 15th Release - Ocata - Adds Core Infrastructure Services and Container Integration

The 15th version of OpenStack has officially hit the streets.

The OpenStack Ocata release focuses on stabilization, including scalability and performance of the core compute and networking services, and brings greater support for container-based application frameworks at the networking layer, as well as containerization of OpenStack services for easier deployment and upgrade management, treating OpenStack as a microservice application.

OpenStack.org noted growing support for container-based application frameworks and deployment tools, with Kolla (containerized OpenStack services), Kuryr (bridging container networking and storage with OpenStack) and Zun (container management) projects seeing the most contributor growth in the release cycle. Other container-related enhancements include:

• Magnum now supports Mesosphere DC/OS as a cluster type and Kubernetes support now includes the new SUSE distribution
• Kolla support for Kubernetes at the control plane
• Kuryr container networking service now supports Docker Swarm
• The new Fuxi (“FOO-si”) subproject of Kuryr connects Cinder and Manila storage to container environments

“A year ago, people thought contai

ners might be the death of OpenStack,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, “but they were actually a new source of momentum for the cloud platform. Using container orchestration frameworks to run OpenStack like an application makes it easier to operate. That means it takes fewer people to run the cloud, making OpenStack a more accessible and practical option to those running at smaller scale.”

Other updates include:

• New Nova compute “placement” API that helps users intelligently allocate resources based on application needs. Cells v2 has also become default to increase scalability of Nova
• Horizon dashboard now supports keystone-to-keystone federation as new os-profiler UI, which gives operators the ability to detect performance issues across OpenStack services
• Auto-provisioning for Keystone federated identity dynamically creates a project and assigns a federated user a role upon successful authentication
• Ironic bare metal service becomes more robust with networking and driver enhancements
• Zaqar messaging service added Swift object storage as a backend to easily leverage an existing Swift cluster without deploying another MongoDB or Redis cluster
• Greatly improved performance and CPU usage for Telemetry projects: storing millions of metrics per second is now possible using Ceilometer with Gnocchi storage engine
• Active/Active HA in Cinder service can now be implemented by drivers
• Congress governance framework now has policy language enhancements to enable network address operations for better network and security governance
• A new “nova-status upgrade check” command line interface enables operators to test the readiness of their deployments to see if they can safely upgrade to Ocata or find out what needs to be addressed before upgrading to ensure stability and reliability. This is especially important as OpenStack’s adoption shows increasing maturity, with a 20 percent increase in production deployments year-over-year, reaching 71 percent in production or full operational use, according to the latest OpenStack User Survey.

https://www.openstack.org/news/view/302/openstack-ocata-strengthens-core-infrastructure-services-and-container-integration-with-15th-release-of-cloud-computing-software

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Huawei and SK Telecom Deploy 200 Gbit/s ASON Backbone

Huawei has announced the deployment of its automatically switched optical network (ASON) solution on SK Telecom's 200 Gbit/s network in Korea to address growing demand for ultra-fast mobile broadband access. Huawei noted that this, the first deployment of its ASON solution on a commercial 200 Gbit/s network, is designed to significantly increase data capacity and transmission speeds to enable SK Telecom to both expand its high-bandwidth mobile services and accommodate future 5G network traffic in South Korea.

The largest mobile operator in South Korea serving around 29 million mobile subscribers, SK Telecom has deployed LTE and LTE Advanced technology to increase network speeds and plans to start 5G testing before the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, as well as to commercially trial mobile 3D imaging, UHD video and other emerging technologies. To prepare for the deployment of 5G, SK Telecom is planning to build a 5G oriented high-speed backbone network.

Huawei's OTN+ASON solution will constitute a key element of this new high-speed backbone network. The solution, which supports 200 Gbit/s per wavelength, will increase network bandwidth and is designed to enable the evolution to ultra-high-speed, 1 Tbit/s transmission while also meeting SK Telecom's requirements in terms of high capacity, efficient O&M and security.

Dependent on the transmission distance involved, the Huawei solution will allow SK Telecom to select 16QAM, 8QAM or QPSK modulation technology, which will help the operator adapt to different transmission scenarios as well as support future service requirements using Huawei programmable and universal boards. In addition, the OTN platform can be integrated with multiple 2G, 3G and 4G legacy backhaul networks that SK Telecom operates to help simplify its infrastructure and improve O&M efficiency. The Huawei 200 Gbit/s backbone network also features the ASON architecture and is fully meshed, which means it adapt to accommodate multiple fibre cuts for enhanced network reliability and security. Huawei noted that next-generation ASON employs unicast ASON to support a full range of video services.

http://www.huawei.com

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NEC Introduces Smart WTN Wireless Transport Solution for 5G

NEC announced the availability of its new Smart Wireless Transport Network (Smart WTN) solution, designed to equip operators to address bottlenecks in mobile backhaul for 5G networks by providing a high capacity pipe for dynamic network optimisation.

NEC's Smart WTN solution combines NEC's iPASOLINK EX, a compact radio communication system that offers wireless transmission capacity of up to 10 Gbit/s in the E-band range, with a Backhaul Resource Manager (BRM) SDN controller that allows dynamic control of both wired and wireless networks. The solutions also features NEC's proven artificial intelligence (AI) technology, NEC the WISE.

The integrated solution is designed to enable migration for projects ranging from small first-time deployments to large-scale deployments utilising AI.

NEC noted that to accommodate higher speed communications and IoT will require the adoption of small cells and higher capacity mobile backhaul to connect cell sites, in addition to maintaining the existing macro cells. The new Smart WTN solution is designed to enable flexible network build-out, as well as providing traffic and defect predictions and adaptability to environmental and behavioural changes to allow operators to dynamically modify operations for improved efficiency and reduced power consumption.

NEC announced in July 2016 that it would brand its line of AI technologies as NEC the WISE. NEC the WISE is a portfolio of AI technologies developed by NEC to help address complex issues facing society. Separately, NEC announced it had completed joint verification trials with NTT DOCOMO utilising massive MIMO technology for 5G base stations. The trials were conducted in central Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture, and involved NEC's massive-element Active Antenna System (AAS) supporting the low-SHF band (3 to 6 GHz). The trials employed the low-SHF band-compatible AAS in the base station for both outdoor and indoor environments.
http://www.nec.com

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