In keeping with its practice of naming releases after rivers, the OPNFV Project announced the availability of OPNFV Brahmaputra. It's the second platform release by the community, which last year launched Arno.
"We were able to work upstream with our community to very significantly" help bring feature development into OPNFV that's relevant to end users and the whole ecosystem, said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV.
The upstream communities where Brahmaputra's integration process was able to pull the latest code include OpenStack, OpenDaylight, OpenContrail, ONOS and ETSI. At the same time, more than 30 accepted projects contributed new capabilities, specifications and community resources.
Feature enhancements include fault management, service function chaining and enhanced support for IPv6. It was also the first time an ARM-based lab joined Pharos. "We're marching toward being able to support multiple hardware architectures," Kirksey told FierceWirelessTech.
"Building on the foundation of Arno, the OPNFV community worked tirelessly to integrate and combine components from multiple communities to deliver Brahmaputra, which brings end-to-end feature realization," Chris Price, technical steering committee chair, OPNFV and Open Source Manager for SDN, Cloud & NFV at Ericsson, said in a press release. "The impact is substantial; we've now established methodologies and mechanisms for further cross-project and feature development."
OPNFV is designed to facilitate collaboration among 165+ developers from network operators, solution providers and vendors that focus on integration, deployment and testing of upstream components to address NFV needs.
The organization is a bit different from other open-source endeavors in that a lot of its focus is on integrating components from other projects to create an NFV platform. OPNFV's work has involved a lot of setting up of automated installation and deployment processes, as well as getting test infrastructure in place.
OPNFV is planning its first plugfest to take place the week of May 9 at the CableLabs headquarters in Louisville, Colo. The event will give the industry a chance to collaborate and test interoperability of different products with the Brahmaputra release.
According to a panel of top network virtualization experts speaking last week at the FierceWireless and TelecomAsia executive luncheon, "When Will Deploying SDN and NFV Pay Off for Operators," at Mobile World Congress 2016, wireless operators know they have to virtualize their networks, the big question is how and when.
Rupesh Chokshi, director, AT&T (NYSE: T) Mobile and Business Solutions, said that his company, which is widely considered a leader in network virtualization with its Domain 2.0 program, realized that it had to move to SDN and NFV if it wanted to remain competitive. As of the end of 2015 the company said it has virtualized 5.7 percent of its network and by the end of 2016 it expects to virtualize 30 percent of the network. AT&T expects to have 75 percent of its network virtualized by 2020.
For more:
- see this press release
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