opnfv

OPNFV member base grows as Lenovo deepens investment in open source

SAN FRANCISCO, June 28, 2016 — The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced that Lenovo has joined as a Platinum member to advance open source NFV. The company joins 20 existing Platinum members, including AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Ericsson, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DOCOMO, Red Hat, SUSE, Telecom Italia, Vodafone, and ZTE.

Lenovo is a global Fortune 500 company and one of the leading companies driving innovative consumer, commercial, and data center technology. With a portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services, the business spans PCs (including the legendary Think and multimode YOGA brands), workstations, servers, storage, networking, smart TVs and a family of mobile products such as smartphones, tablets and apps. A longtime supporter of open source and open networking, Lenovo continues to deepen its investment by working with projects such as OpenDaylight, OpenStack and now, OPNFV.

“Working within the framework of the OPNFV and OCP communities, Lenovo is aggressively investing in product enablement, system architecture, and research and development to create the best user experience,” said VP of Next Generation Infrastructure, Brian Connors. “Together with Red Hat, a leading enterprise OpenStack provider, we’re helping reduce complexity and cost, while enabling even greater flexibility and value.  Our engagement with the OPNFV project as a Platinum member will help accelerate development around NFV platforms for our shared service provider customers.”

“Lenovo is reinforcing its commitment to open standards, demonstrating that open source projects accelerate innovation and unlock true business value,” said Director of OPNFV, Heather Kirksey. “We thank them for their support and look forward to their contributions to the growing OPNFV community.”

As part of their membership, OPNFV will welcome Igor Marty, CTO of Telecommunications, Lenovo, to the Board of Directors. Additionally, Lenovo plans to leverage OPNFV to advance open NFV architectures that can be customized and are highly secure to address the demanding needs of service providers. These solutions will embrace technologies from Red Hat and other leading innovators in the open source community.

OPNFV hosted its annual Summit in Berlin on June 22-23, 2016. News of Lenovo’s membership was informally announced during OPNFV Director Heather Kirksey’s opening keynote presentation. The Summit brought together 620 members of the OPNFV community including network operators, vendors and developers. To watch Kirksey’s opening keynote or view presentation slides, photos and other content from the Summit, visit the recap page here.

About the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)

Open Platform for NFV is a carrier-grade, integrated, open source flexible platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using NFV. It brings together service providers, vendors and users to collaborate in an open forum on advancing the state-of-the-art in NFV. For more information, please visit  http://www.opnfv.org.

OPNFV is Collaborative Project at the Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org.

Additional Resources

• How to Participate
• OPNFV Resources
• OPNFV Blog

Media Inquires
Jill Lovato
OPNFV Project
pr@opnfv.org

New Project Members, User Groups, and Internship Program help accelerate growth of open source NFV project

BERLIN, OPNFV Summit, June 22, 2016 — The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source flexible platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced the addition of new Silver member, BII Group, and Associate members, Okinawa Open Laboratory and Synchromedia Research Group. The newest members join the project’s growing roster of global organizations across industry sectors committed to advancing open source NFV.

Today’s news was announced during the opening keynote presentation of the second annual  OPNFV Summit in Berlin. The Summit brings together developers, end users, and upstream communities from around the globe working to advance open source NFV in an open forum.

OPNFV’s focus on meeting service provider requirements is reflected at the Summit in a keynote panel with speakers from AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile, Telefonica, and Vodafone; six service provider Proof of Concepts (PoCs); and more than 25 service provider speakers in track sessions.

The project also launched the OPNFV Internship Program, open to university students interested in enhancing networking and software development skills while contributing in a meaningful way to the OPNFV project. Each intern works with a mentor in the OPNFV community to complete a project in three or six months. Current OPNFV interns are focused on projects ranging from determining the performance steady state of Cinder Volume, to deploying and testing JOID installers within OpenDaylight scenarios, to building a Pharos lab at CENGN, to creating a compliance tool for the evaluation of Community Pharos Labs.

OPNFV also announced the formal launch of the OPNFV User Groups program. In its pilot phase, it grew to more than 200 members across seven user groups. These regional, self-organized associations meet locally to collaborate on OPNFV and make up a key part of the OPNFV ecosystem.

“This year’s Summit is the perfect culmination of momentum we’re seeing not just in Europe, but across the globe, which is helping to transform the way networks are designed,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “I’m delighted over the commitment demonstrated by our growing community as individuals and organizations—including our newest members BII Group, Okinawan Open Labs and Synchromdeia, who bring expertise ranging from research to standards to cloud—with the common goal of collaborating and strengthening the adoption of open source NFV across the industry come together.”

About the Newest Members

BII Group is committed to the development route of owning core technology, formulating international standards, and promoting industrialization. As a vanguard in formulating and promoting international standards, BII Group has blazed a trail of cooperation with international organizations, leading formulation of international standards, launching industrial alliance, hosting summits to boost industry, academy, research and application, and standardization and industrialization of establishing public service platforms. The subordinate testing centers are committed to the research and the popularization of IPv6, SDN, NFV and IoT.

“Open source is a cornerstone to our core technology and business,” said Lui Dong, president and CEO of BII Group. “We continue to identify and align with key open source projects like OPNFV, an innovator in the NFV industry. Our partnership solidifies our commitment to deepening the ecosystem.”

OOL (Okinawa Open Laboratory) is a worldwide unique laboratory that promotes integration of Cloud and SDN/NFV activities across various technical fields. OOL is based in Okinawa, which serves as a gateway to Asian countries actively working on technological exchanges with regions across Asia.

“The integration of cloud and SDN/NFV activities is crucial to our lab work,” said Yukio Ito, chairman of Okinawa Open Laboratory. “A partnership with the OPNFV project is paramount for deepening our investment and leveraging the community for joint success.”

Synchromedia is one of the largest research laboratories of the University of Quebec’s Ecole de technologie superieure (ETS), Canada. The CANARIE GreenStar Network, led by Synchromedia, was the first distributed cloud in the world to be powered entirely by renewable energy. Synchromedia is collaborating with world-class players, like Ericsson and Ciena, to build new NFV and SDN platforms converging Telco Cloud, IoT, and 5G technologies.

“We are proud to be the first Canadian university research lab to become an Associate Member of the OPNFV community,” said Kim Nguyen, associate professor and vice-director of Synchromedia Lab. “Synchromedia Lab will bring our 10-year research expertise in cloud computing and green ICT to this project. I’m eager to see OPNFV evolve as a platform supporting Telco Cloud, IoT, and 5G applications.”

OPNFV Summit is made possible with generous support from sponsors including Diamond sponsor Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Platinum sponsors Ericsson, Huawei, Intel and Red Hat.

About the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)

Open Platform for NFV is a carrier-grade, integrated, open source flexible platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using NFV. It brings together service providers, vendors and users to collaborate in an open forum on advancing the state-of-the-art in NFV. For more information, please visit http://www.opnfv.org.

OPNFV is Collaborative Project at the Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org.

Additional Resources

• Service Provider video
• OPNFV User Groups
• OPNFV Internships
• How to Participate
• OPNFV Blog
• OPNFV Events

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Media Inquires
Jill Lovato
OPNFV Project
pr@opnfv.org

OPNFV and Heavy Reading survey finds the majority of operators plan to leverage the output of OPNFV

BERLIN, OPNFV Summit,  June 22, 2016 – The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced onstage at OPNFV Summit the results of a global survey commissioned by Heavy Reading to understand network operators’ perceptions of OPNFV and how the project can help accelerate NFV transformation. The data indicated an overwhelming majority (99 percent) of those surveyed agree that at just 21 months in, OPNFV is poised to deliver on its promise to accelerate NFV.

The survey was  designed to gauge market perceptions of the OPNFV project, including expected outcomes, its role in shaping open source NFV, industry intent to leverage OPNFV output, and overall impact.The survey follow-up a baseline survey also conducted by Heavy Reading in September 2015.  Specifically targeted towards telecommunications network operators, the data reveals an updated look at the drivers, barriers, timelines and critical upstream integration needed for OPNFV to succeed in advancing open source NFV adoption.

Key findings include:

• OPNFV is critical to the telecom industry. While 99 percent of those surveyed believe OPNFV will deliver on its promise, 93 percent also believe OPNFV is either essential or important to the telecom industry as a whole. And 97 percent of those surveyed plan to leverage the output of OPNFV in some way.
• Upstream integration is more important than ever. 99 percent agree OPNFV is relevant to upstream open source projects. Respondents overwhelmingly (85 percent) ranked OpenStack as the most important upstream project to OPNFV’s success, followed by OpenvSwitch (49 percent), KVM (42 percent) and OpenDaylight (37 percent).
• NFV is making headway. While NFV deployments are still young, operators are further along in the journey than they were eight months ago. Data shows that only six percent of operators have no NFV strategy planned at all, compared to 14 percent in September 2015.
• Barriers remain. Some of the biggest barriers for organizations to get involved with OPNFV include “lack of skill set” and “lack of upper management support.” While these factors are keeping some organizations on the sidelines, many (47 percent) recognize NFV is a priority for their company and the majority of those (53 percent) indicated they know how to get involved with OPNFV when their organization is ready to begin NFV planning and execution.
• Security. Security was cited as the top technology that OPNFV should investigate. Recognizing its growing importance in the community, last year OPNFV formed a security working group dedicated to improving security through architecture, documentation, code review, upstream inter-work with other groups, and vulnerability management and security research. Their work provides an umbrella group focused on developing security-centric functions within the ecosystem, including a proposal to deliver a security management system for OPNFV.
• Management and Orchestration (MANO), and the related value OPNFV can provide, is increasingly important. Ranked as one of the top three technologies OPNFV should investigate (along with security and OSS/BSS integration), operators believe OPNFV can aid in addressing MANO by proposing industry-wide APIs in support of orchestration; demonstrating integration of MANO projects into the OPNFV platform;  and providing upstream feedback to MANO projects components (including Virtual Infrastructure Managers, Virtual Network Function Managers, and Software Defined Networking controllers).

“It’s inspiring to see that the industry believes in the importance of what we’re doing with OPNFV,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “Our strong community continues to grow and thrive and while we’re still  a young organization, the results of the survey indicate we’re still on the right path. It’s important we get a regular pulse on what the industry needs so we can refine our approach, and focus our efforts on how best to accelerate open source NFV.”

The survey results, which include input from more than 90 network operator professionals focused on engineering, research and development, network planning and corporate management, primarily based in North America, Europe and Asia, were shared on stage during the second annual OPNFV Summit, which brings together developers, end users, and upstream communities working to advance the creation of an open source framework for NFV. More details on the survey results are available here.

About Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)

Open Platform for NFV is a carrier-grade, integrated, open source flexible platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using NFV. It brings together service providers, vendors and users to collaborate in an open forum on advancing the state-of-the-art in NFV. For more information, please visit: http://www.opnfv.org.

OPNFV is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org

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Additional Resources

• Getting Started with OPNFV
• OPNFV Resources
• OPNFV Blog
• OPNFV Events

Media Inquiries
Jill Lovato
OPNFV Project
pr@opnfv.org