ON.Lab’s ONOS Project noted its eighth SDN platform release expands southbound and northbound protocol, legacy device support
The telecommunications market’s choice of software-defined networking platforms continues to blossom, with the Open Networking Laboratory’s Open Network Operating System Project releasing its latest SDN platform variant under the “Hummingbird” tag.
The SDN platform, which is the eighth version from the open-source ONOS Project, is claimed to offer high availability and scalability, expanded southbound and northbound protocols, and improved ability to support incremental SDN on legacy devices. (Full details are available here.)
In terms of southbound enhancements, Hummingbird is claimed to expand ONOS’ ability to configure and control legacy networks and provides additional support for Arista and Cisco devices. This is supported through the inclusion of optical feature enhancements to Open Shortest Path First and ISIS drivers, while NetConf upgrades provide support for additional devices.
For northbound support, ONOS said Hummingbird includes new features for improved interoperability and ways for applications to interact with the northbound protocol through message bus integration and adds flexibility for intent-based management.
To support legacy devices, ONOS said 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.” The platform also includes commercial support for ONOS with Huawei’s Agile Controller 3.0 offering.
Huawei last year announced a partnership with the ONOS Project to build an open ecosystem designed to support commercial carrier deployments of SDN. The vendor earlier this year demonstrated how an ONOS-based transport super controller using Open Networking Foundation T-API standard interface models can deliver end-to-end transport topology and service control across multiple transport domains.
“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,” noted Bill Snow, VP of engineering at ON.Lab.
ON.Lab in June unveiled its seventh platform iteration, dubbed “Goldeneye.” That release included claimed advances such as improved adaptive flow monitoring and selective DPI from ETRI, said to provide lower overhead flow monitoring and YANG tool chain support from Huawei; integration of northbound intent subsystem with the Flow objective subsystem; a six-times improvement in core performance to support consistent distributed operations; and southbound improvements to Cisco IOS NetConf and YANG tool chain.
Looking ahead, ONOS said future releases will focus on development of dynamic configuration with YANG models and services, virtualization and new northbound interfaces driven by open source collaboration.
The Linux Foundation-hosted organization targets service providers with significant recent work around its central office re-architected as a datacenter initiative. The CORD platform has seen carrier interest from the likes of AT&T, Verizon Communications and SK Telecom, among others. ONOS noted the CORD initiative is designed to “provide economies of scale and agility of cloud computing to the telco central office by leveraging infrastructure constructed from commodity building blocks” using software-defined networking, network functions virtualization and cloud technologies.
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