China Unicom said it plans to work with the ONOS project to deploy SDN
The Open Network Lab’s Open Network Operating System project continues to attract members, with China Unicom recently announcing plans to cooperate with the ONOS project to promote software-defined networking industry development into China Unicom’s operations.
China Unicom said tapping into the ONOS’ project’s open-source SDN controller platform will help the telecom giant transform its network operations in applying SDN and network functions virtualization technologies.
“Currently, China Unicom is in a transformation phase,” explained Tang Xiongyan, chief expert of China Unicom Network Technology Research Institute. “SDN represents a huge opportunity for China Unicom to achieve network transformation and service innovation. China Unicom and ONOS share a vision of promoting the SDN industry chain readiness and a prosperous application ecosystem, especially the development of open-source network controllers. China Unicom will closely cooperate with ONOS to push SDN technologies forward.”
ON.Lab launched the ONOS project late last year targeting service providers with a scalable SDN control plan “featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control and service applications across mission-critical networks.” Founding members of the ONOS initiative include AT&T, NTT Communications, Ciena, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel and NEC.
The project recently unveiled its Blackbird platform, the second release from the ONOS community targeting the SDN market. The Blackbird release is focused on “performance, scale and high availability,” while also addressing the challenge of “effectively determining the ‘carrier-grade quotient’ of the SDN control plane.” Blackbird’s backers claim current metrics, including Cbench, do not provide a complete or accurate view of the SDN control plane capabilities, which Blackbird is set to provide.
RCR Wireless News recently spoke with Prajakta Joshi, director of product at O.N. Lab, who provided insight into the history of the group, the formation of ONOS and the recent Blackbird release. Joshi also hinted about the pending China Unicom partnership.
China Unicom is the country’s No. 2 mobile operator behind the world’s largest operator China Mobile.
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