OpenDaylight, Most Pervasive Open Source SDN Controller, Celebrates Sixth Anniversary with Neon Release

• In just 6 years, OpenDaylight boasts 10 Releases, 1000+ authors/submitters, 100K+ commits, and powers networks of 1B+ global subscribers
• Neon release hardens SDN controller features and advances support for edge, cloud native, and downstream projects like ONAP, Kubernetes, and OpenStack

SAN FRANCISCO —  March 26, 2019 — LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across networking projects, today announced OpenDaylight (ODL), the most pervasive open source Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller, celebrates its sixth anniversary with the release of OpenDaylight Neon.

The Linux Foundation’s first networking project and now part of LFN, OpenDaylight was founded in 2013 as an open source framework to accelerate adoption, foster innovation, and create a more open and transparent approach to SDN. Today, ODL has become the most pervasive open source SDN controller that helps power over 1B global network subscribers. Its 10th release, OpenDaylight Neon, demonstrates industry commitment to fostering an open, scalable and interoperable networking solution and supporting ecosystem of developers, integrators, and users.

“This has been possible in large part due to the modular and extensible software architecture which makes it possible to use OpenDaylight in a variety of use cases,” said Abhijit Kumbhare, OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee chair.

“Neon speaks to OpenDaylight’s longevity as well as its integration with other projects like Kubernetes, ONAP, OPNFV, and OpenStack,” said Phil Robb, vice president, Operations, Networking, and Orchestration, the Linux Foundation. “I am continually impressed by the community’s cohesiveness in delivering platform releases with updates and features that enhance evolving SDN use cases.”

Most Pervasive Open Source SDN Controller

• Scope, diversity and deployments: In just six years, OpenDaylight has delivered 10 releases with the help of 1000+ authors/submitters who contributed 100K+ commits, across dozens of unique organizations. Additionally, ODL-based solutions help power over 1B global network subscribers.
• Support from top vendors, end users: Over time, ODL community contributions have moved from a select group of initial creators to a diverse set of global users and vendors, all  building and leveraging solutions based on ODL today.
• In-demand upstream: As a robust open source SDN controller, ODL continues to be sought-after by key downstream projects across layers of the network stack, including Akraino Edge Stack, Kubernetes, OpenStack, ONAP, OPNFV, and more.

More industry partners continue to deploy the ODL platform and realize the power of open SDN/NFV. Recent examples include:

• Coweaver, one of the largest optical network system makers in South Korea, used ODL to build its Network Management Service (NMS), which is leveraged by South Korean and global vendors.
• FRINX’s UniConfig, now powered by PANTHEON.tech’s lighty.io, is based on OpenDaylight and enables vendors to build and deploy applications faster
• Inspur’s OpenDaylight-based SDN controller is used to manage virtual and physical devices for both enterprise and government cloud environments in China
• Partnership between NoviFlow and Lumina Networks, a provider of OpenDaylight-based SDN Controller solutions, who together are using OpenDaylight as part of a solution to create and deliver an intent-based Terabit-scale network that reduces costs and network complexity.
• Lumina Networks also just announced Lumina Extension & Adaptation Platform, LEAP, which is a platform that extends the benefits of OpenDaylight to legacy devices as well as advanced model-to-model translation, and a cloud native app (or MicroServices) dev environment.
• Telecom Argentina has chosen OpenDaylight for a wide range of use cases, including the enablement of CDN traffic optimization capability that improves customer experience and reduces data transport costs
• Integration with other open source communities continues to grow, including collaborations with OpenStack, Kubernetes, OPNFV, and ONAP. ONAP is using OpenDaylight in its APP-C, SDN-C, and SDN-R projects for use cases like 5G and CCVPN

Meanwhile, SDN adopters   including AT&T, CableLabs, China Mobile, Ericsson, Globo.com, Orange, Tencent, Verizon, and more – continue to leverage OpenDaylight within their networks and solutions. More details on OpenDaylight user stories are available here.  

OpenDaylight Neon brings best-in-class functionality for key SDN use cases
Neon includes updated features important to networking use cases, such as optical transport networking, WAN connectivity and routing, as well as virtual networking in cloud and edge environments. Neon also features new stability and scalability enhancements, and cements the project’s leadership in working with other open source communities to expedite next-generation networking solutions. Specific enhancements include:

• Cloud/Edge Network Virtualization features have been hardened with the Neon release to further enhance the suitability of OpenDaylight in production networks.
• Optical Transport Infrastructure Control, now offers new features that ensure interoperability with higher level controllers using an open northbound API;
• WAN Connectivity. Building on Fluorine’s mature BGP stack, Neon brings enhancements that improve error reporting, restarts and network stability.
• Improved Stability and Reliability. Neon includes improvements in stability and scale, in addition to functional enhancements and bug fixes. OpenDaylight continues to undergo infrastructure enhancements making it easier for vendors and downstream open source projects to rapidly put-together and deploy OpenDaylight-dependent products and platforms.

More details on OpenDaylight Neon are available here: https://www.opendaylight.org/what-we-do/current-release/neon

Looking Ahead
In conjunction with the Open Networking Summit (ONS) April 3-5 in San Jose, Calif., OpenDaylight will host a Developer Forum, April 1-2, 2019, for its next release, “Sodium.” More details are available here: https://wiki.opendaylight.org/view/Events:Sodium_Dev_Forum. There will also be a demo of OpenDaylight’s integration with Network Service Mesh in the LFN Booth at ONS. ONAP Dublin, slated for mid 2019, will include the OpenDaylight Fluorine release to support the SDN-C and APP-C modules.

Ongoing Support for OpenDaylight

AT&T
“We are pleased to congratulate OpenDaylight on its sixth birthday,” said Brian Freeman, Distinguished Member Technical Staff, AT&T Labs. “AT&T has been using OpenDaylight since Hydrogen, with production deployments since Helium in 2015. Today, we have global deployments with L3 applications using BGPCEP and NETCONF. Our deployments span control of L0 OpenROADM devices to L7 Mobility PNFs and VNFs. Needless to say, we look forward to test-driving Neon and deploying it to production.”

Cisco
“OpenDaylight has massively evolved in its six short years and I’m incredibly proud to have been part of the community from the beginning,” said Dave Ward, CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect, Cisco.  “With a large, sustainable community showing strong collaboration across a diverse set of developers, vendors, and end users, its become the de facto open source SDN controller for the industry. It’s great to see how many other hugely impactful OSS projects are using ODL at their core. I’m very excited to watch it’s evolution into the future. Happy Birthday ODL!”  

Ericsson
“Congratulations to the OpenDaylight community on both the Neon release, and the longevity that it’s sixth anniversary represents,” said Eric Ericsson, Head of Solution line NFVi, Ericsson. “Ericsson continues actively to upstream to the  OpenDaylight community and to use the ODL open source software in our commercial NFVi solutions, that enable telecom operators evolved to 5G and to be more productive and lower OPEX and CAPEX expenditures. This includes solutions for onboarding cloud based services, as well as offering intra and inter cloud network automation, multi tenancy and other advanced networking use cases. Ericsson has so far deployed ODL software to  more than 50 service providers worldwide”.

INSPUR
“Warm congratulations to the OpenDaylight community on the release of Neon and project’s sixth anniversary,”  said Max Zhang, CTO, Inspur Cloud Service Group. “Inspur’s Cloud Engine SDN Controller 2.0, based on OpenDaylight Nitrogen SR2 release, has been deployed in both government and enterprise clouds environments. It helps our customers to deploy businesses quickly and flexibly, automate network management, and significantly reduce the cost of operation and maintenance.  Future Inspur Cloud Engine SDN Controller releases will continue to use the newest and most stable OpenDaylight release to provide even more features for our customers.”

Lumina Networks
“The digital transformation OpenDaylight was built to support, isn’t easy,”  said Andrew Coward, CEO of Lumina Networks. “But in six years, this impressive effort of community innovation has managed to start returning network control and service innovation to the Service Providers. It’s an honor to contribute to our shared goals and continue to reach these release milestones.”

Red Hat
“The OpenDaylight project started a little more than six years ago with an ambitious set of goals, creating a community from scratch to build an evolving, flexible and open source software-defined networking platform,” said Chris Wright, CTO, Red Hat. “Over those six years, we’ve seen the power of community-driven innovation take OpenDaylight from an aspiration to a thriving open source ecosystem of SDN developers and users. Congratulations to the ODL community on their continued success with the launch of the Neon release.”

About The Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

###

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.