Building on its practice of naming releases after rivers, the OPNFV Project today announced the availability of OPNFV Colorado, the project’s third platform release. It follows OPNFV Brahmaputra and Arno.
OPNFV Colorado includes advances that lay the foundation for NFV applications and services with feature enhancements related to security, IPv6, Service Function Chaining (SFC), testing, VPN capabilities and support for multiple hardware architectures.
The whole purpose of OPNFV is to advance NFV among operators and their partners, and this latest release represents a more refined version of the platform for the industry, according to Heather Kirksey, director of OPNFV, which is based in San Francisco. “We’re building our underlying platform support by strengthening a number of features,” she told FierceWirelessTech.
A lot of Tier 1 mobile operators worldwide are expected to incorporate SDN and NFV into their 5G architectures. In the U.S., AT&T has been particularly up front about how it plans to aggressively move to a software-driven network well before 5G even becomes standardized.
NFV kicked into high gear in November 2012 when seven of the world’s leading telecom network operators picked ETSI as the home for the Industry Specification Group (ISG) for NFV. Membership in the ISG NFV has now grown to more than 290 individual companies, including 38 of the world’s major service providers.
Of course, there are a number of open source projects underway, including Open Daylight, Open Contrail, ONOS and more. Especially as the OPNFV, “it is really our job to get along with and work with these upstream organizations to help them make their components more NFV ready and also so they can work with the rest of the pieces of the platform,” Kirksey said.
The announcement of the Colorado release from the OPNFV collaborative development project marks yet another milestone for deployment-ready NFV open source infrastructure on the ARM architecture, according to Bob Monkman, segment marketing manager at ARM. The ARM ecosystem has been integral from the beginning with the release of Arno and then Brahmaputra, he said in a blog post.
“Looking ahead, you will see an ARM-based Danube platform in the first half of 2017,” he said. “Our ongoing collaboration with OPNFV ensures the industry can access platforms based on the ARM architecture and real TCO benefits enabled by its performance-per-watt, density and scalability advantages.”
OPNFV is at the OpenDaylight Summit in Seattle this week, Sept. 27-29. The next OPNFV Plugfest will be held December 5-9 at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab in Durham, New Hampshire. The event will focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in three key areas of testing: OPNFV deployment, network integration and VNF applications.
For more:
- see this press release
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