The Linux Foundation Announces Intent to Form Open Source Unified Orchestrator Project for SDN and NFV

OPEN-O Project represents global, industry-wide effort to advance agile networking operations

SAN FRANCISCO and BARCELONA, SPAIN, Mobile World Congress – February 23, 2016 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today is announcing the intent to form the OPEN-Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O). This collaborative effort will bring the industry together to develop the first open source software framework and orchestrator to enable agile software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) operations. The effort is being detailed today at a press conference hosted by The Linux Foundation, China Mobile and Huawei at Mobile World Congress.

Early support for OPEN-O comes from Brocade, China Mobile, China Telecom, DynaTrace, Ericsson, F5 Networks, GigaSpaces, Huawei, Infoblox, Intel, KT, Red Hat, Raisecom, Riverbed and ZTE. OPEN-O is inviting others interested in this technology to participate.

“China born and global in nature, OPEN-O will unite industry forces to set up the world’s first SDN and NFV unified orchestrator, serving as an important step in promoting deeper convergence among SDN and NFV technologies and innovation in the networking industry,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation.

Next-generation networking technologies such as SDN, NFV and cloud computing are enabling autonomous, real-time telecom operations. However, many conventional operational support systems (OSS) are based on proprietary software, which leads to fragmented technologies and interoperability issues for carriers. As an open source orchestration framework, OPEN-O will integrate open networking technologies and enable carriers to quickly and cost-effectively implement SDN and NFV through open source code development. The project will also aim to accelerate multi-vendor integration, service innovation and improve agility across network operations.

OPEN-O will follow governance practices consistent with Linux Foundation projects, which could include a Technical Steering Committee and an End User Advisory board to ensure alignment of needs between the technical and end user communities. The project intends to create a development and testing platform as well as build and support an open source developer community.

“The Telecommunication 4.0 era features the full convergence of IT and CT; it relies on NFV and SDN as the key technical enablers for automatic deployment and agile operation. The orchestrator functions at the top part of them play the critical role. We are hoping that all partners work together to build the healthy ecosystem and accelerate the maturity of SDN and NFV. By embracing open source, China Mobile is expecting that the OPEN-O project will develop state-of-art open-source orchestrator software.”

Li Zhengmao, executive vice president of China Mobile

“Telecom networks are moving towards NFV/SDN, and Huawei will help operators get there by re-architecting network infrastructure by means of systems integration using OPEN-O. The orchestrator is the core component for NFV/SDN-based systems integration and involves a large number of multivendor interfaces. Huawei embraces open source with the aim of achieving an industry standard, together with industry partners, and to realize flexible resource orchestration and scheduling in a multivendor environment, thereby accelerating operators’ operations and transformation and driving future business growth. ”

Dr. Howard Liang, Huawei’s senior vice president and president of the Global Technical Service Dept.

For more information or to get involved, please visit: https://www.openo.org

Additional Comments

“Operators are now facing the transformation of capabilities to provide user-centric services, from connectivity-oriented service to integrated cross-domain, cross-layer and cross-vendor services. With the introduction of SDN and NFV, the networks are becoming increasinglyautomatic and service-oriented, inspiring much more creation and exploring to build up a rich and flat ecosystem. OPEN-O will set up the world’s first SDN and NFV unified orchestrator platform. China Telecom is expecting this platform can play a significant role in the development of SDN/NFV. China Telecom is willing to work together with other operators and partners to promote the collaborative innovation and look forward to a bright future of SDN and NFV.”

Shen Shaoai, China Telecom’s deputy general manager of Technology Department 

“Ericsson promotes and leads development of open source ecosystems for next generation technologies, accelerating adoption and industry alignment in key areas of the Ericsson 5G and Networked Society vision. Ericsson welcomes open source initiatives for SDN, NFV and Cloud and has been actively driving industry alignments through OPNFV to benefit our customers and partners. Orchestration provides a natural extension of the OPNFV and virtualization ecosystem creating a platform for innovation and collaboration in areas of service enablement and analytics for networks to help our customers to succeed in their digital transformations.”

Martin Bäckström, vice president and head of Group Function Technology Industry Area Datacom of Ericsson

“As the provider of Cloudify, GigaSpaces is happy to contribute to the OPEN-O initiative from our experience in core orchestration functionality. Supporting OPEN-O fits naturally with our belief in open source, multi-VIM, TOSCA-based orchestration solutions aligned with the ETSI standard. It’s perfect for our existing partners and users, many of whom support OPEN-O, such as Brocade, MetaSwitch and Nominum, alongside carriers such as Deutsche Telekom and Orange Labs. We share the same vision of IT and CT convergence. Cloudify is already in use at leading enterprises and telcos for cloud-native applications, microservices and network orchestration, and OPEN-O hold the promise of delivering new value through open standards.”

Nati Shalom, CTO, GigaSpaces

“Open source is already producing significant innovations in NFV and SDN, helping telecommunications to modernize and move to next-generation networks. Management and network operations (MANO) represents a critical pillar of NFV solutions and to achieve real interoperability, it needs to be built collaboratively by open source community efforts. OPEN-O offers the potential to drive even more collaboration and faster innovation, with many industry leaders working together to advance networking operations.”

Chris Wright, vice president and chief technologist, Red Hat.

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 commercial 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 atwww.linuxfoundation.org. 

### 

The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.