ETSI’s Open Source MANO (OSM) release 4.0 is lighter weight, more mature
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute responsible for European Union telecom standards, announced Release 4 of its Open Source MANO (management and orchestration) standard last week. ETSI is billing OSM 4.0 as a lighter, more mature and stable interface, using 75% less RAM, says ETSI in a press release.
In Release 4.0, OSM improved the northbound interface, the interface that communicates with higher-level components on a carrier-grade network. The northbound interface now follows the ETSI NFV SOL005 specification, which ETSI says provides “a single pane of glass to control the OSM system.”
OSM gave a sneak peek of OSM 4.0 in April.
OSM is supposed to be easier to install now via cloud native. A new graphical user interface is available to be installed on top of the core components to help operators visualize what is happening in the network and sandbox VIM. OSM 4.0 also improved monitoring, modeling and networking logic.
ETSI says OSM 4.0’s improves “on-demand and descriptor-driven setting of alarms and metrics” making them simpler to configure and consume. A new policy manager “opens the door to closed-loop operations.” IP profiles are now supported and MAC addresses can now be configured for non-cloud-native virtual network functions. “The support of service function chaining assisted by the VIM, or the possibility of using alternative images for public clouds, are only some examples,” says ETSI in its press release.
OSM 4.0 is “on the path” to supporting native charms, “so that conventional Juju applications can run natively in OSM — and for the seamless management of physical network functions (PNFs) or hybrid components (physical and virtual), enabling a true end to end service orchestration across virtual and physical network domains.”
The goal is to provide a production-quality MANO stack for NFV (network functions virtualization), a key element in how networks will become flexible enough to manage 5G capabilities, such as network slicing.
Using the open source process, OSM went from Release 1 to 4 in two years. OSM is an operator-led ETSI community with at least 53 participant and 44 member organizations, of which Telefónica is one of the largest and most vocal supporters.
“ETSI OSM is a growing community which includes many Global Service Providers, leading IT/Cloud players and VNF vendors who drive OSM’s roadmap on a use-case basis. A growing ecosystem of commercial OSM distributions and a large number of OSM-ready VNFs are key indicators of the success of ETSI OSM in terms of market relevance and adoption,” said Francisco-Javier Ramón, chairman of the ETSI OSM group, in a press statement.
