Linux Foundation Announces Further Harmonization Efforts, Celebrates New Members and Project Deployments

LFN Touts Microsoft Membership Upgrade, Ecosystem Expansion and future vision

LOS ANGELES — Open Networking Summit —  March 27, 2018 — The LF Networking Fund (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across networking projects like ONAP and OPNFV, today announced new members, new project releases and deployments and an expanded vision of harmonization across technologies as well as beyond the traditional networking stack.

“We are thrilled to celebrate expansion across all of our projects and the overall ecosystem with major community and technical milestones,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of Networking, The Linux Foundation. “LFN’s mission is to deliver leading open source network platforms that enable the cloud-native future of service providers, enterprises, cloud providers and application developers. Our growth signals the increasing role of open source networking in driving innovation in new areas like edge computing and 5G. We congratulate the community on their success and look forward to future innovation.”

Formed earlier this year, LFN is a new entity focused on nurturing integration, efficiencies and member engagement across FD.io, OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV, PNDA, and SNAS. As the leading projects are hosted under the same umbrella, LFN builds upon project synergies to create rapid innovation and adoption.

The LFN is participating at Open Networking Summit this week (March 26-30) in Los Angeles through a series of presentations, demos and trainings. To learn more about ways to engage onsite or for more information, please visit here.

LFN Reaches 100 Members in Just Three Months

LFN continues to add new members at various levels since launching in January 2018. Today 100 members, spanning a diverse group of organizations and industries, are part of LFN. Furthermore, Microsoft, has deepened its commitment to open source networking by upgrading its membership to Gold.

New Silver members include:

• Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data center using industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage, open networking and data protection technologies.
• Guavus is one of the leading companies in real-time big data analytics, enabling businesses to analyze data the instant it’s captured, driving faster decision-making, lower costs and higher growth.
• KDDI is one of the largest telecommunication service providers in Japan, offering both mobile and fixed-line communications.
• SDN Essentials is a one-stop shop for planning, building, and executing a modern network with specialization in SDN, NFV, and DevOps concepts. Their comprehensive range of services—education, training, consulting, and managed services—is designed to optimize their clients’ networks for better performance, cost, and reliability.

New Associate members include:

• Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) is a national university distinguished by the teaching and research in the field of cable communications, wireless communications, computer, and electronic engineering.
• CENGN (Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks) is a consortium of industry, education and research leaders dedicated to accelerating the commercialization of next-generation communications solutions. CENGN supports the testing and validation of innovative network solutions through its multi-vendor cloud infrastructure.
• An industry association of 200+ member companies, MEF is the driving force enabling agile, assured, and orchestrated MEF 3.0 communication services across a global ecosystem of automated networks. MEF 3.0 services provide an on-demand, cloud-centric experience with unprecedented user- and application-directed control over network resources and service capabilities.
• The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is an operator led consortium spearheading disruptive network transformation.
• Okinawa Open Laboratory is a research organization created to pursue the applicability of the latest open source technologies related with SDN/NFV and cloud computing.
• SDN/NFV Industry Alliance (SDNFVIA) was founded by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), together with 15 organizations and is guided by the principle of openness, innovation, collaboration and implementation. The alliance focuses on increasing the readiness in SDN/NFV commercial utilization and promoting the healthy development of the SDN/NFV industry.

Project Deployments & Milestones

LFN projects continue their momentum with new releases, deployments and community growth.

OpenDaylight

• OpenDaylight helped introduce many organizations in the industry to a new way of working, and kicked off a major shift in how innovations are delivered, consumed and monetized. Over 35 companies now formally deliver OpenDaylight-based solutions, applications, professional services and training, and many others–technology providers as well as service providers–use components of the platform within their privately branded offerings. To date, OpenDaylight has been deployed in carrier and media networks, such as Bell Canada, Orange, China Mobile, Tencent and more–supporting over 1 Billion subscribers. Learn more about OpenDaylight’s latest release Oxygen here.

PNDA

• Platform for Network Data Analytics (PNDA), which brings together a number of open source technologies to provide a simple, scalable big data analytics platform, issued their latest major release containing a number of new features and improvements. PNDA 4.0 now includes multi-user awareness as well as support for securing web services on PNDA via certificate and key upload. A number of revisions covering improved resource management, support for Spark 2, data ingestion and compaction are also featured. Additional information about the release can be found here.

FD.io

• FD.io recently issued its sixth release, FD.io 18.01, focused on enhancements to improve Kubernetes networking, Istio, and cloud native NFV. Specifically, FD.io’s high-performing data plane services offered in a container allow it to be used to construct cloud native VNFs enabling NFV to break free of virtual machines and advance to Kubernetes. FD.io also announced expansion as its being leveraged in products from multiple vendors (Cisco and Netgate) as well as growth among the community via new projects.

ONAP

• ONAP celebrates its one-year anniversary with an expanded list of cross project deployments. ONAP enables nearly 60 percent of the world’s mobile subscribers.
• ONAP helped enable 60 percent of the world’s mobile subscribers.  For example, Orange, a Platinum LFN member, is using ONAP, OPNFV and OpenDaylight to drive its On-Demand Network transformation efforts. China Mobile, Vodafone and Bell Canada are also using ONAP in early production deployments. The LFN booth will include an ONAP demonstration that features how to design, orchestrate and manage VoTLE — a complex end-to-end, real-world service composed of multiple VNFs from different vendors based on the ETSI NFV architecture. ONAP and Kubernetes will also be demoed together in the CNCF booth, showing the best of network automation and cloud native orchestration by enabling ONAP deployments to any public, private, or hybrid cloud.

OPNFV

• Orange and China Mobile are using OPNFV’s Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline and testing to create internal NFV onboarding frameworks. Orange uses OPNFV for NFVI and VIM validation, VNF onboarding and validation, and network service onboarding. China Mobile uses OPNFV for their Telecom Integrated Cloud (TIC) to continuously integrate, onboard and test NFVI, VIM and VNFs; and full network service onboarding and testing using OPNFV is on their roadmap.
• LFN’s formal partnership with OCP brings expanded integration and testing of OCP hardware with OPNFV software as well as collaboration across open source hardware and software to enable full open source network stacks.
• Integration with ETSI is expanding as OPNFV and ETIS will co-locate the next community testing events —  OPNFV’s Fraser Plugfest and the Third ETSI NFV Plugtest Event —  May 29 through June 8 in Sophia-Antipolis, France.

Harmonizing open source and standards paves the way to a long-anticipated convergence of automation and virtualization within networks. In 2017 open source networking projects began to integrate their ideas across platforms, introducing an open, modular networking stack. Today, LFN is shaping the future impact of open source networking, a catalyst in the disruption of traditional networks, also known as the next phase of harmonization.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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