If you're looking for the latest and greatest on software-defined networking (SDN), the Open Networking Summit (ONS) in Santa Clara, Calif., is the place to be this week.
Taking place at the Santa Clara Convention Center and Hyatt Regency Santa Clara June 14-18, this is the year when service providers will share their deployment lessons and early experiences of leveraging SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) in their networks, organizers say.
The program will look at how SDN manifests through use cases in tangible ways. "We're bringing in every aspect of SDN technology for enterprises and services providers into one single forum," said Ram Appalaraju, executive adviser at ONS.
Last year was interesting in that the first set of products started to roll out. This year, participants can talk more about actual use cases from AT&T and others, Appalaraju told FierceWirelessTech.
For the first time, ONS will feature under one roof all three major open networking projects: Open DayLight (ODL), Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV). Developer tracks will provide a deep dive into codebase, SDKs and development tools, APIs and integrations. Tutorials are targeted for engineers who want to start writing SDN applications and setting up SDN solutions.
The opening keynote panel will discuss how SDN and NFV are addressing large scale network complexity and enabling rapid deployment of services, with panelists from AT&T, NTT Communications and Telstra. Wednesday's morning keynote will feature talks by SDN/NFV leaders at Google, Microsoft and AT&T. John Donovan, senior executive vice president, AT&T Technology and Operations, will return to address various open-source SDN tools and how service providers can use them to address initial and large-scale production deployments.
The ONS organizers also promise attendees will get a look into Google's data center network design and implementation, focusing on the data, control and management plane principles underpinning five generations of network architecture.
More than 1,200 people are expected to attend representing product and business managers who are planning three to five years out, as well as apps developers, experienced technicians and engineers and research-oriented professionals. More than 20 solutions will be part of a solutions showcase.
Appalaraju said he personally knows people who spent 35 years just doing low level system programming for companies like IBM and that one skill set carried them through three-plus decades. Of course, that's not the case today as skill sets and requirements change.
The issue now is how to bring agility to the network and allow faster deployment and provisioning of services. For wireless operators, any deployment they do has to support the tsunami of data and video services that are only projected to increase going forward.
For more:
- see this ONS website
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