Following its open source release on Dec. 5, 2015, the Open Sourced SDN Network Operating System--ONOS for short--has crossed 1,000 software downloads globally and welcomed two new members: Cisco and SK Telecom.
ONOS is a carrier-grade software-defined networking (SDN) operating system for service provider networks architected to provide high availability, scalability, performance and rich northbound and southbound abstractions. ON.Lab, which released ONOS with leading service providers, vendors and collaborators in December, is a nonprofit organization founded by SDN inventors and leaders from Stanford University and the University of California-Berkeley.
Cisco and SK Telecom join founding members that are providing funding and contributions to the ONOS initiative: AT&T (NYSE: T), NTT Communications, Ciena, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel and NEC. Other members that are collaborating and contributing include ONF, Infoblox, SRI, Black Duck, Internet2, GARR, CNIT and Create-Net.
"We feel it's important that we participate because what they are trying to do is create a SND controller for service providers, and that is a very explicit in their objective," Kang-Won Lee, senior vice president of R&D at SK Telecom, told FierceWirelessTech. "SDN is a very key component in 5G wireless technology, we feel. It is our intent to develop ONOS technology the way that it meets our requirements and use cases."
The Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) is also an important industry group, which SK joined recently as well. "In my view, those efforts are complementary, and we need both to reach where we want to arrive," he said. "We will do our own development as well, but this is a very important area because with this open approach, you don't have to worry about dealing with individual vendors and differences in technologies coming from different parties." With open source, "they need to speak the same language, if you will."
AT&T says its goal is to virtualize and control more than 75 percent of its network using a software-driven architecture by 2020. SK Telecom doesn't have a number like that, but by 2020, a substantial part of SK's networks will be driven by software, he said.
For more:
- see the press release
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