Announcements

With even more mature cloud native integration, better testing, additional features, and expanded CI/CD infrastructure, OPNFV Fraser builds ecosystem bridge to cloud providers

San Francisco — May 1, 2018 — The OPNFV Project, an open source project within The Linux Foundation that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through reference platform development, integration, deployment, and testing, today announced the availability of the sixth OPNFV platform release, OPNFV Fraser. Making the mission of OPNFV more operationally relevant, Fraser advances the state of NFV around cloud native applications and new upstream project integration while continuing end user support as they deploy and test virtualized networks.

By increasing support for cloud native applications and providing access to readily deployed NFV infrastructure on demand, OPNFV provides the platform and tooling required by developers with whom end users are actively collaborating to validate, integrate, onboard, and test NFVI, VIM, VNFs, and network services. With a new level of maturity that brings the industry even closer to true cloud native integration that can be leveraged by cloud providers, Fraser has deepened its testing capabilities around functional, performance, stress, and benchmark testing. The release also brings new carrier-grade features around monitoring, service assurance, networking, and dataplane acceleration. With these updates, Fraser strengthens the project’s position as the nexus point for collaboration across networking ecosystems.

“Since inception, OPNFV has been the place for industry collaboration with upstream communities, which has grown even more with the Fraser release,” said Heather Kirksey, VP, Community and Ecosystem Development, The Linux Foundation. “With more mature cloud native integration and expanded testing and collaboration, OPNFV delivers the tools needed for end users to validate and test new network services.”

Key updates in OPNFV Fraser include:

• Advancing the support for cloud native NFV. Fraser expanded cloud native NFV capabilities in nine different projects, more than doubled the number of supported Kubernetes-based scenarios, deployed two containerized VNFs, and integrated additional cloud native technologies from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) relating to service mesh (Istio/Envoy), logging (fluentd), tracing (opentracing with Jaeger), monitoring (Prometheus), and package management (gRPC). These updates move the cloud native capabilities from basic container orchestration to include operational needs for cloud native applications. Additionally, the FastDataStacks project takes advantage of FD.io work to incorporate the VPP dataplane into Kubernetes networking capabilities to enable cloud native network-centric services.
• More mature testing. OPNFV continues to focus on the real-world deployment needs of service providers by expanding test case coverage and scope. Testing projects in Fraser see a robust increase in test cases. Functest, the OPNFV functional testing project, now permits use of its framework with other open source projects such as ONAP. This avoids duplication, reduces VM size, and accelerates the creation of additional test cases. Functest also added test cases to cover Kubernetes and Clover and made it easier and faster to run functional tests. Also in support of real-world needs, performance test projects extended the Day 0 performance testing to long-running performance testing as Day N operational issues become more real for service providers.
• Continuous Integration (CI) updates enable increased community hardware utilization, which in turns speeds up the testing process. Fraser includes the latest versions of upstream projects and advanced dynamic CI with the introduction of metadata descriptor specifications for Scenarios, PODs, and installers that will make hardware allocation for scenarios dynamic and automated. The XCI cross-community project made additional cloud-native strides by initiating CI/CD integration work with the CNCF Cloud CI project.
• New carrier-grade features are added, specifically in the areas of monitoring, service assurance, networking, and dataplane acceleration. Specific new features include:
  • • The Doctor project, in conjunction with OpenStack, whose collaboration was instrumental in achieving this milestone, introduced an infrastructure maintenance use case for zero VNF downtime. Similarly, Barometer continued to expand the monitored items list and plugin support. The Calipso project added support for Kubernetes and physical/physical-virtual switch connections across heterogeneous environments.
  • The SFC, SDNVPN, FastDataStack, and Parser projects added new features around networking and dataplane acceleration.
  • The IPv6 project now supports clustering, simplifying network configuration, and is exploring IPv6 container networking.

Supporting Operator Deployments

Orange and China Mobile have used OPNFV continuous integration (CI) pipeline and testing projects to create an NFV onboarding framework within their organizations. Orange uses OPNFV for NFVI and VIM validation, VNF onboarding and validation, and network service onboarding. China Mobile uses OPNFV for their Telecom Integrated Cloud (TIC) to continuously integrate, onboard and test NFVI, VIM and VNFs; and full network service onboarding and testing based on OPNFV is on their roadmap.

“Orange sees OPNFV as the right vehicle to create and end-to-end solution to certify VNFs, NFVI reference architecture, and integration with ONAP,” said Jehanne Savi, Executive Leader of the AII-IP and On-demand Networks Programmes, Orange.

What’s Next

The ​fifth ​OPNFV ​Plugfest will be co-located with ETSI at their location in Sophia Antipolis, France on June 4-8, 2018. Testing will include ETSI test cases and will focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in deployment, network integration, VNF applications, and more. Both OPNFV members and non-members are welcome to attend.

The recently announced OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) had four graduates in its first iteration (Huawei, Nokia, Wind River, ZTE) and is recruiting more vendors and network operators to participate in the next version of the test suite and program.

The virtual central office (VCO) demo is expanding into residential services with a virtualized Mobile Network use case, including vRAN for the LTE RAN as well as vEPC for a minimum viable mobile access network configuration. The demo will be featured at the Open Networking Summit Europe event, September 25-27 in Amsterdam.

The seventh OPNFV release, Gambia, due out end-of-year or early 2019, will include a slew of new projects. Areas of focus are expected to featureinclude: C-RAN (cloud radio area network), AUTO (ONAP automated OPNFV), eEdge cloud, and Capstone (certificate management service), among others.

More information about OPNFV Fraser is available at https://www.opnfv.org/software/downloads.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

The Third ETSI NFV Plugtests Event and OPNFV Fraser Plugfest will take place at ETSI from 29 May to 8 June

Sophia Antipolis, France, 21 March 2018: ETSI and OPNFV will co-locate their next community testing events in Sophia Antipolis, France. The third ETSI NFV Plugtests™ event will be held between 29 May and 8 June 2018, and the OPNFV Fraser Plugfest will be held from 4 to 8 June. ETSI and OPNFV look forward to increasing collaboration across the standards and open source ecosystem by co-locating their testing activities. OPNFV is an open source project within The Linux Foundation that facilitates development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing.

“Effective interoperability is the goal of any standards activity, and ETSI NFV adopted an approach oriented towards actually exercising and demonstrating interoperability from its start in 2012, evolving from Proofs of Concepts to Plugtests activities,” says Diego Lopez, chairman of ETSI ISG NFV. “This event is a new opportunity to strengthen the current cooperation with relevant open-source communities in the NFV landscape.”

The third NFV Plugtests event will concentrate on building and demonstrating complex Network Services that combine virtual network functions from different VNF providers and developers, while testing interoperability with MANO solutions across different platforms and sites. It will also exercise advanced NFV features like network and service automation. The sessions will demonstrate how multivendor combinations of NFV components can address 5G and zero-touch network and service management use cases, and will expand the scope of NFV API testing to help progress the work on NFV conformance testing.

OPNFV plugfests focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in deployment, network integration, VNF applications, and more. The event provides a platform for the community to work with hardware from both open source and commercial vendors and try out various combinations of components. During the last OPNFV plugfest, December 4-8, 2017, the focus was on the OPNFV Euphrates release and included discussion on contributing specific test cases for the combined ETSI/OPNFV plugfest in June. Read the full Plugfest Report here. The focus of the next plugfest will be on the Fraser release as well as developer design sessions for topics related to testing, CI/CD, and future releases. Participation is open to any interested developers.

“We are pleased to be co-locating our next OPNFV plugfest with ETSI,” said Heather Kirksey, VP, community and ecosystem development, The Linux Foundation. “Acceleration of NFV interoperability is a shared goal among both organizations and overlapping communities; co-locating the events will facilitate greater collaboration of resources and more consistency within deployments.”

Open source communities such as ETSI Open Source MANO, Open Baton, OpenStack and OPNFV are actively involved in the ETSI Plugtests’ activities through their membership and implementations. Collaboration among standards organizations, open source communities, and testing events enable better cross-project communication and harmonization.

The two-week ETSI event is part of the ongoing ETSI NFV Plugtests Programme. The programme takes advantage of the ETSI Hub for Interoperability and Validation (HIVE) to inter-connect worldwide participating organisations (more than 45 currently), engaging in different validation tests. It provides the foundation for the direct interaction among function developers with interoperability as the essential goal.

About ETSI

ETSI provides members with an open, inclusive and collaborative environment to support the timely development, ratification and testing of globally applicable standards for ICT-enabled systems, applications and services across all sectors of industry and society. We are a not-for-profit organization with more than 800 member organizations worldwide, drawn from 66 countries and five continents. Members comprise a diversified pool of large and small private companies, research entities, academia, government and public organizations. ETSI is one of only three bodies officially recognized by the EU as a European Standards Organization (ESO).

For more information please visit: www.etsi.org

About OPNFV

OPNFV Project a Series of LF Projects, LLC (“OPNFV”) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration, deployment and testing, OPNFV creates a reference NFV platform to accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks. For more information, please visit http://www.opnfv.org. OPNFV is part of Linux Foundation Networking (LFN), an effort to support, coordination and provide resources across open source communities advancing open networking. For more information, please visit https://www.linuxfoundation.org/networking.

Contacts:

ETSI: Claire Boyer

Mob: +33 (0)6 87 60 84 40

Email: claire.boyer@etsi.org

OPNFV/The Linux Foundation: Jill Lovato

+01 (503) 703 8268

Email: jlovato@linuxfoundation.org

• Collaboration across open hardware and software to enable full open source stacks
• Expanded integration and test of OCP hardware with OPNFV
• Harmonization across disaggregated hardware with Switch Network Operating Systems

SAN JOSE, Calif. (OCP Summit), March 20, 2018—The Linux Foundation and the Open Compute Project (OCP), a collaborative community focused on redesigning hardware technology to efficiently support the growing demands on compute infrastructure, today announced a joint collaboration to further the development of software- and hardware-based open source networking. The organizations will work together to create stronger integration and testing, new open networking features, more scalability, a reduction in CAPEX/OPEX, greater harmonization with switch network operating systems, and increased interoperability for network functions virtualization (NFV) network transformation.

Virtualization of network functions and the resulting disaggregation of hardware and software have created interest in open source at both layers. OCP provides an open source option for the hardware layer, and The Linux Foundation’s OPNFV project integrates OCP along with other open source software projects into relevant NFV reference architectures. Given this alignment, OCP and OPNFV already have been collaborating on activities such as plugfests and joint demos. Now they have committed to expanded collaborative efforts.

“The Open Compute Project has been quite successful at disaggregating traditional IT gear and creating vanity free ingredients. It is now time to carefully select the ideal hardware and software ingredients to re-integrate into efficient solutions,” said Bill Carter, chief technology office, OCP.

“The work being done by OPNFV is a key piece of that re-integration: bringing together the best open source software projects together with the best choices of open source hardware, to enable NFV. By integrating and testing a set of reference architectures on top of efficient, scalable cloud hardware, OPNFV is removing all the roadblocks to NFV adoption and transformation of the telecom infrastructure.”

“It’s exciting to see the principles of open source software development come to hardware, and OCP has already made a substantial contribution to some Linux Foundation project plugfests and demos,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, networking, The Linux Foundation. “We see OCP as an integral partner as we explore new opportunities for NFV deployments, performance, features, and footprint. Global network operators agree and ranked OCP very high on a list of the most important projects for OPNFV in a recent survey. We look forward to continued and intensified collaboration across ecosystems.”

OCP, LF Networking projects, and other ecosystem partners will be onsite at ONS North America, March 26-29 in Los Angeles. The event will include six tracks bringing networking and orchestration innovations together with a focus on the convergence of business (CIO/CTO/architects) and technical (DevOps) communities.  More detailed information on how OCP and OPNFV are collaborating is available in a new OPNFV + Open Compute Project Solution Brief, available here.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

About Open Compute Project
The Open Compute Project Foundation is a 501(c)(6) organization which was founded in 2011 by Facebook, Intel, and Rackspace. Its mission is to apply the benefits of open source to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center and beyond. Learn more at www.opencompute.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Open source NFV project establishes industry threshold for NFV testing, deployment

San Francisco — February 6, 2018 — The OPNFV Project, an open source project within The Linux Foundation that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing, today announced the availability of the OPNFV Verified Program (OVP). Designed to simplify adoption in commercial NFV products, OVP establishes an industry threshold based on OPNFV capabilities and test cases. A new landing page explains the program benefits in more detail, and users can get started at the new OPNFV Verified portal.  

OPNFV members, including network operators, worked closely to establish a framework and reached consensus for an initial set of capabilities that help operators establish entry criteria for their POCs and RFPs. OVP facilitates both vendor self-testing and third-party lab testing. The initial version will test and verify NFV infrastructure components and features, including NFVI, VIM, underlying cloud infrastructure, basic packet forwarding, IPv6, and VPN. The program will evolve over time as more capabilities and test cases are added, with continuing test suite releases and possibly expanding to include VNFs and other components in the future.

“We are breaking new ground by leveraging open source platforms to measure compliance of commercial products,” said Heather Kirksey, VP, Community and Ecosystem Development, The Linux Foundation. “This is a huge step for the industry, and speaks to the power of open, community-driven solutions to help the ecosystem in real-world deployments. I am incredibly proud of the collaborative work that has gone into establishing this set of common NFV platform requirements to aid the industry on the path towards robust NFV deployments.”

Based on early participation during the beta program, several vendors provided valuable feedback that helped refine and finalize the program, and those organizations now represent the first cohort to receive the privilege of using the OPNFV Verified mark and logo: Huawei, Nokia, Wind River, and ZTE.

Operators are encouraged to participate in the program by sharing use cases and functional requirements as well as incorporating OVP into RFP processes and trials. Vendors may download the Dovetail framework for compliance testing of commercial offerings.

More information about OVP is available at https://www.opnfv.org/verified.

Quotes from OVP Verified Organizations

Huawei
“The OPNFV Verified Program (OVP) is a great example of open source communities leading the way to help lower complexity in multi-vendor NFV solutions,” said Wenjing Chu, senior director, head of Open Source and Research, Huawei. “OVP reduces risks for carriers in NFV adoption by decreasing the integration and verification cost and enhancing interoperability. Huawei is a leader and strong supporter of this community initiative, and we are excited that FusionSphere is one of the first products certified under OVP. Huawei is committed to NFV and carrier transformation towards more agile and intelligent networks. As part of that commitment, we will continue to strongly support OPNFV to help evolve OVP and foster a vibrant and open NFV ecosystem.”

Nokia
“Nokia is very excited to support openness in networking by joining the first companies in the OPNFV Verified program,” said Antti Romppanen, head of Cloud Foundation Product Management, Nokia. “Being able to verify the compatibility of the OPNFV software with our AirFrame data center solution, which is based on open hardware specifications from the Open Compute Project, demonstrates the power of open source across the NFV infrastructure. Going forward, we expect to raise the bar in OPNFV to extend the verification to higher layers and to make the open platform even more competitive.”

Wind River
“As a founding member of OPNFV, Wind River has been participating closely in the innovative work of the technical community to accelerate open source NFV across the industry,” said Charlie Ashton, senior director of business development, Software-defined Infrastructure, Wind River. “We are extremely proud to be in the first group of companies to complete the OPNFV Verified program with our Titanium Cloud solution, enabling us to better meet the needs of our service provider customers while achieving the highest levels of compatibility. We look forward to continuing this work and to contributing further to this important open source initiative.”

ZTE
“As an active member of the community, ZTE is a strong contributor to open source SDN and NFV communities,” said Mr. Julien (Jun) Zhang, chief NFV architect, ZTE. “The OPNFV Verified Program (OVP) is a big milestone for NFV, as it sets parameters for industry interoperability, cooperation and transformation. This will enable better development of network convergence and accelerate the maturity of the cloud industry. ZTE is proud that ZTE TECS Openstack is among the first initiatives to become OPNFV Verified and we look forward to contributing further towards OVP development.”  

OPNFV, as well as other LF Networking projects, will be onsite at ONS North America, March 26-29 in Los Angeles. The event will include an expanded set of six tracks bringing networking and orchestration innovations together with a focus on the convergence of business (CIO/CTO/Architects) and technical (DevOps) communities. For more information, please visit http://www.opnfv.org or https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/networking/.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Fifth iteration of open source NFV project platform advances functionality, interoperability, and performance to accelerate NFV transformation

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Open Source Summit Europe — 24 October, 2017 — The OPNFV Project, an open source project that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing, today announced the availability of OPNFV Euphrates, the project’s fifth platform release. OPNFV Euphrates represents a step forward in functionality, interoperability and performance to help operators advance network transformation via open source NFV.

OPNFV Euphrates delivers Kubernetes integration for the first time as well as enhanced cross-community continuous integration (XCI) and new carrier-grade features such as increased visibility into complex virtualized networks. This is enabled via Euphrates’ platform of pre-tested, tuned, interoperable, open source NFV components that facilitate multiple use cases such as VNF onboarding, network service testing, data plane acceleration, NFVI/VIM validation, MANO qualification, test automation and creation of DevOps methodologies and operational best practices.

“With this initial integration of Kubernetes with the existing stack of open source network components, Euphrates enables NFV to make significant advances in the journey towards cloud native,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “Combined with a focus on XCI and modern DevOps practices, more efficient infrastructure, and enhanced operations capabilities, we’re witnessing the powerful culmination of three years’ worth of collaboration across a broad swath of open source communities, come to life.”

Key enhancements available in OPNFV Euphrates include:

• Architecture: OPNFV container journey begins. Though early, there is an unmistakable trend towards the containerization of VNFs in the industry. Euphrates brings Kubernetes and container integration with multiple components of the end-to-end stack, as well as the ability to deploy containerized OpenStack via Kolla, which provides production-ready containers and deployment tools for operating OpenStack clouds that are scalable, fast, reliable, and upgradable using community best practices. These enhancements enable easier management of the infrastructure, support of cloud native network applications in NFV, and lighter weight control plane capabilities as service providers prepare for edge architectures to support 5G and IOT.
• Integration: access to the latest upstream code. Building on the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline integration work in Danube, Euphrates introduced the implementation of the XCI integrated CI/CD pipeline amongst OPNFV, OpenStack, OpenDaylight, and FD.io. Instead of waiting for an official stable release, the OPNFV CI pipeline integrates the latest upstream code from these upstream projects in order to more quickly resolve bugs and validate features. This reduces the time it takes for feedback on a new feature or bug-fix from months to days, greatly increasing the pace of innovation. XCI also enables multi-distribution support and fosters closer developer relationships.
• New carrier-grade features. With the integration of the new Calipso project, operators now have operational visibility into their complex virtual networks. When combined with telemetry enhancements in existing Barometer and Doctor projects, users have access to a powerful service assurance framework. Euphrates also includes performance improvements on the Arm architecture, and in Layer 3 performance with FD.io. Moreover, Euphrates brings new security and user management capabilities with Moon, continued improvement in Service Function Chaining (SFC), FD.io, and new EVPN features. Euphrates also integrates the OVN network virtualization project along with the most recent versions of other upstream projects to provide additional choice in networking control options.
• Enhanced testing and integration. The OPNFV integration and testing effort has made significant progress in providing an extensive set of tools to test the NFV cloud, VNFs, and complete network services. New projects—including Sample VNF, which provides testing of the VIM/NFVI layer with applications approximating real-life application workloads; and NFVBench, which provides an end-to-end dataplane benchmarking framework—have been introduced. Additionally, existing test projects have continued to evolve with new features, capabilities, and test cases.

“Euphrates brings a deeper level of maturity to the platform,” said Tapio Tallgren, chair of Technical Steering Committee (TSC), OPNFV, and lead software architect, Nokia’s Mobile Architecture Unit. “Iterative updates and improvements in areas such as MANO integration and service assurance, security, testing, and performance are part and parcel to bigger architectural changes that introduce Kubernetes as a VIM to orchestrate containerized VNFs.”

Looking ahead, the OPNFV Fraser Release is scheduled for spring 2018. Evolutions on the horizon include continuing to evolve MANO capabilities through ONAP integration, and a focus on analytics with PNDA.io analytics framework integration.

The OPNFV community is currently planning ts its fourth OPNFV Plugfest, December 4-8, 2017  in Hillsboro, Ore. Hosted by Intel, the event will focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in deployment, network integration, VNF applications, and more. Developers who are both OPNFV members and non-members are welcome to attend. More information is available here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-plugfest.

More information about OPNFV Euphrates is available here: https://www.opnfv.org/software

About the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)
Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration, deployment and testing, OPNFV creates a reference NFV platform to accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks. For more information, please visit  http://www.opnfv.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

OPNFV community furthers research into next-generation networking with addition of Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry during lead-up to fourth developer plugfest

San Francisco—September 13, 2017—OPNFV, an open source project that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing, today announced the Institute for Information Industry (III), an organization dedicated to increasing innovative IT applications while facilitating the development of a knowledge-based economy in Taiwan, has joined the project. III enriches OPNFV’s research capabilities, expanding the community’s research arm even further across the globe, helping the industry prepare for next-generation network technologies.

The newest member joins OPNFV as the community prepares to launch its fifth platform release, OPNFV Euphrates, and solidifies plans for the fourth OPNFV Plugfest. Hosted by Intel, the event takes place December 4-8, 2017 in Hillsboro, Ore., and will focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in deployment, network integration, VNF applications, and more. OPNFV Plugfest provides a platform for the community to work with hardware from both open source and commercial vendors and try out various combinations of components. Developers who are both OPNFV members and non-members are welcome to attend. More information—including registration details—is available here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-plugfest.

“III brings a wealth of expertise in research and innovation to the OPNFV community, and we are pleased to welcome them as the newest member,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV.  “Concurrently, preparations for our next Plugfest are underway and we expect even greater collaboration among the community following the release of OPNFV Euphrates. We look forward to seeing the community progress as a result of contributions from both III and the upcoming Plugfest.”

About III
Over the past 40 years, III has taken part in planning and promoting public policies related to IT innovation. It has contributed to pioneering research and development across information and communication technology sectors, including applications, training and education, and is a leader in building Taiwan’s national IT infrastructure. Currently, III is focused on helping the government of Taiwan promote and prepare for next-generation  mobile networks, including 5G.

“Joining OPNFV enables us to further accelerate open source NFV in Taiwan. Integration of resources across universities, research institutions, service providers, vendors, and other industries within OPNFV is important, especially as the entire global industry prepares for 5G,” Dr. Ming-Whe. Feng, Vice President and Director General, III. “We’ve already been collaborating closely with Okinawa Open Labs (OOL), another OPNFV member, to implement cross-lab testing and solutions development, including OPNFV Functest. We are eager to deepen our work with the OPNFV community.”

OPNFV will also be taking part in Open Source Networking Days (OSN Days) 9 – 19 October, a series of regional events in Paris, Milan, Stockholm, London, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo, hosted and organized by local members and Open Source Networking user groups, with support from open source networking projects within The Linux Foundation: DPDK, FD.io, ONAP, OpenDaylight, OPNFV, PNDA, and others. In addition to technical sessions, tutorials and workshops, attendees will hear from community experts on the state of the industry, collaboration and touch points between projects that make up the open source networking stack, the business opportunities enabled by network transformation. More information is available and registration is open here: https://sites.google.com/linuxfoundation.org/osndays/home.

About the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)
Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration, deployment and testing, OPNFV creates a reference NFV platform to accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks. 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.

OPNFV and Heavy Reading survey reveals growth in importance of OPNFV among operators, broadened scope of upstream integrators

BEIJING –  OPNFV Summit – June 14, 2017 – 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 conducted by Heavy Reading to understand network operators’ perceptions of OPNFV and how the project accelerates NFV transformation. The data indicated continued confidence in OPNFV as 98 percent of survey respondents agree that at almost three years in, OPNFV is delivering on its promise to accelerate open source NFV.

Designed to gauge market perceptions of the OPNFV project over time, the survey is the third in a series conducted by Heavy Reading analyzing telecommunications network operator perceptions of how OPNFV impacts the industry. The data includes an updated analysis of the state and impact of OPNFV among operators, its role in shaping open source NFV, industry intent to leverage OPNFV output, as well as current drivers, barriers and integration needed for success in advancing open source NFV adoption.

Key findings include:

• OPNFV remains critical to industry adoption of NFV. 98 percent of telecom operators surveyed are either somewhat or very satisfied that OPNFV is delivering on its promise to help accelerate open source NFV adoption, while almost half (45 percent) said OPNFV is most helpful for operators to achieve their NFV goals. The top expected benefits of OPNFV output include easier integration and more rapid NFV deployment.
• OPNFV is growing in importance, particularly among those currently deploying NFV. More than half (54 percent) of nearly 100 Communication Service Providers (CSPs) surveyed said OPNFV has become more important to their organization over the past year; that number jumps to 70 percent for those with NFV in production. Similarly, 75 of those surveyed actively follow OPNFV, with more than a quarter of them directly contributing to the project.
• OPNFV is moving from Proof of Concept (PoC) to production. In addition to OpenStack and SDN controllers– which are foundational upstream integrators for OPNFV–CSPs are acknowledging the importance of additional supports needed for open source telco designs. Now, they are acknowledging the value of hardware based on open source designs (51 percent cited the Open Compute Project specifically), leveraging technologies to provide performance needed to support demanding telco workloads (41 percent cited DPDK), and stronger focus on operational issues (32 percent cited ONAP), and optimizing applications for improved efficiency (37 percent cited Docker).
• Though still in the early stages, DevOps plays a critical role to the overall success of NFV. 80 percent of survey respondents feel DevOps is essential or important to the success of NFV, with half either evaluating various toolchains (26 percent) or working on automating and testing infrastructure (25 percent). However, less than 15 percent are currently building CI/CD pipelines internally and only 13 percent currently push patches to production daily via automated tools/validation. Bringing true DevOps methodologies across multiple communities is a key tenet of OPNFV and the project continues to make progress in the creation of a truly integrated DevOps pipeline for NFV.
• Testing and interoperability rank among top OPNFV activities. Top OPNFV activities important to operators include: providing VNF interoperability testing on different platforms; promoting network operator interest in upstream projects; helping converge architectural concepts; and providing end-to-end functional system testing. Similarly, close to half of respondents ranked documentation and consistent environment configuration across multiple stacks as critical OPNFV activities. This is a testament to OPNFV’s testing activities – including the Pharos Community Labs, a federated NFV testing infrastructure of community labs designed for hosting CI/CD and testing of the OPNFV platform – continue to flourish.
• Barriers still remain. Despite continued progress, barriers to NFV adoption still remain – including interoperability between core infrastructure platforms and VNFs; maturity of MANO software and OSS/BSS integration; and cultural issues/mindset. To help overcome some of these barriers, OPNFV will put a greater focus on developer training and onboarding, improve documentation, and better quantify upstream impact.  

“It’s encouraging to see validation from operators that OPNFV is on the right path, especially among those with NFV in production, and that OPNFV’s importance to the ecosystem continues to increase,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “Feedback continues to be incredibly helpful as we shape our strategy and refine our approach. As the ecosystem evolves it’s critical we work to best meet the ever-changing needs of network operators in the march towards broad open source NFV adoption.”

The survey, which includes input from more than 98 network operator professionals across North and South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East focused on engineering, research and development strategy, network planning and corporate management. Survey results were shared on stage during the third annual OPNFV Summit, which brings together developers, end users, and upstream communities working to advance open source NFV. More details on the survey results are available here.

OPNFV Summit also featured a live keynote demonstration by the OPNFV community of a Virtual Central Office (vCO) hosting Residential and Enterprise vCPE services. The demonstration showed a platform built using an OpenStack cloud, OpenDaylight SDN controller, OpenCompute Platform (OCP) compliant hardware, and on-boarding of a series of VNFs providing end-to-end services. The demonstration showed this network service working live on stage provisioning connectivity and vCPE, with real-time telemetry and analytics, fault management and service assurance. A video of the demo will be available on the OPNFV You Tube channel following the event.

OPNFV also announced plans for its fourth OPNFV Plugfest focused on the upcoming OPNFV Euphrates release. The event will take place December 4 – 9 at the Intel campus near Portland, Ore. A summary of outcomes from the recent OPNFV Danube Plugfest, which took place April 24 -28 at Orange Gardens near Paris, is available here.

About the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)
Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration, deployment and testing, OPNFV creates a reference NFV platform to accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks. 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
Download OPNFV Danube
OPNFV Resources
OPNFV Blog
Upcoming Events

Media Inquires
Jill Lovato
OPNFV Project
pr@opnfv.org

SOURCE: Light Reading

May 16, 2017 10:28 ET

Light Reading Announces 2017 Leading Lights Awards Winners

The Telecom Industry’s Most Prestigious Awards Have Recognized the Leaders in the Communications Networking Industry, Including Those Innovating in NFV, 5G, SDN, the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Services and More