The ONOS Project promises that the open source ONOS community will see significant improvements now that it’s made its eighth quarterly platform release, Hummingbird, available.
“Hummingbird is the ideal platform to deliver the full SDN value proposition to service providers,” Bill Snow, vice president of engineering at ON.Lab, said in a press release. “Hummingbird delivers important advancements not only in the core control functions, but also in support of automation and configuration of legacy and OpenFlow-enabled devices to serve the growing set of use cases being tackled by service providers today and into the future.”
Snow told FierceWirelessTech that wireless service providers use ONOS in a number of use cases, including centralized control of IP/optical infrastructure and when providing the network configuration and control for NFV infrastructures (like CORD). This allows them to disaggregate RAN and EPC, support mobile edge computing, add services in a very agile way (agility of cloud providers) and lower infrastructure costs (data center economics). Because the Hummingbird release of ONOS supports both incremental and disruptive SDN, it provides a migration path from existing infrastructure to achieve the benefits, according to Snow.
CORD – or Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center – has emerged as a significant use case as it's specifically designed for service providers to reinvent the central office to bring data center economies of scale and cloud-style agility to their networks.
ONOS provides the SDN configuration and control for use cases like SD-WAN and provides the underlay/overlay network control for NFV infrastructures. All of this also allows operators to offer new services, gauge how they fly with customers and quickly change them as needed -- services are quickly added as software functions rather than vertically integrated boxes so it becomes much easier.
Among the new features in ONOS Hummingbird is the expansion of ONOS to be able to configure and control legacy networks with additional support for Cisco and Arista devices. It also includes new features that improve interoperability and ways for applications to interact with the Northbound protocol through message bus integration (RabbitMQ from Adara and Kafka from Calix), as well as add more flexibility for intent-based management.
In support of disruptive SDN, ONOS continues to focus on scaling views for very large networks and making it easy for applications to be written to benefit from ONOS’ high availability primitives. Hummingbird brings major new features with additional distributed primitives, support for controller to controller peering and enhancements to the P4 driver support.
Organizations involved in the ONOS initiative include AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Google, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, Verizon, Ciena Corporation, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei Technologies, Intel, NEC Corporation, Nokia, Radisys and Samsung.
For more:
- see the press release
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