Announcements

China SDN/NFV Industry Alliance and NETSCOUT, INC. join open source NFV community to accelerate growth in China, further work with segment routing and security

Boston, Mass.—OpenStack Summit—May 8, 2017 — The OPNFV Project, an open source 8: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 China SDN/NFV Industry Alliance, a 50+-member alliance focused on increasing the readiness of SDN/NFV, and Netscout, a leading provider of business assurance, have joined the project.

The newest members are coming on as the community hosts OPNFV Day as part of OpenStack Summit’s Open Source Days on Monday, May 8. Workshop attendees will become familiar with the collaboration between OPNFV and OpenStack communities, the feature development process, the march toward common infrastructure, and how to get involved.

By joining OPNFV, China SDN/NFV Alliance and NETSCOUT help further diversify the project’s member roster, comprised of leading service providers, carriers, vendors, research institutions, and other collaborators, all working together to accelerate open source NFV and the end-to-end open networking stack.

“We are pleased to welcome China SDN/NFV Industry Alliance and NETSCOUT to the OPNFV community as our newest members,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “Collaboration is key to accelerating a collective vision for the future, and we look forward to their diverse perspectives and contributions, including the acceleration of open source NFV in China and further exploring the areas of service assurance and security with the support of NETSCOUT.”  

More about the newest members
The China SDN/NFV Industry Alliance was founded in November 2014 by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), together with 15 organizations in the industry. Guided by the principle of openness, innovation, collaboration, and implementation, the 50+-member alliance focuses on increasing the readiness of SDN/NFV commercial utilization and promoting the healthy development of SDN/NFV industry.

“SDN/NFV Industry Alliance brings the industry together to build up the SDN/NFV ecosystem, promote solutions to help organizations migrate from existing networks to new, SDN/NFV-based architectural solutions,” said China SDN/NFV Industry Alliance chairman, Mr. Wei Leping.  “At present, SDN/NFV Industry Alliance has set up a special test team which relies on the CTTL Certification Lab of the China Academy of Information and Communication Research, to carry out NFVi integrated testing. By joining the OPNFV community, we hope to work together in an integrated, multi-vendor testing environment to drive solutions that advance commercial deployments of NFV technologies.”

NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, INC. is a leading provider of business assurance—a powerful combination of service assurance, cybersecurity, and business intelligence solutions—for today’s most demanding service provider, enterprise and government networks. NETSCOUT’s Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology continuously monitors the service delivery environment to identify performance issues and provides insight into network-based security threats, helping teams to quickly resolve issues that can cause business disruptions or impact user experience. NETSCOUT delivers unmatched service visibility and protects the digital infrastructure that supports our connected world.

“We are extremely pleased to have joined the many distinguished members of the OPNFV project, which is committed to accelerating the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks to a dynamic software-centric platform,” stated Dr. Vikram Saksena, chief solutions architect, NETSCOUT.  “As a leading player of security and service assurance technologies, we believe NETSCOUT’s expertise will allow us to make an invaluable contribution to OPNFV. In addition to benefitting the industry as a whole, our customers will also benefit from our participation, as NETSCOUT gains critical insights into leading-edge technologies.”

OPNFV is hosting its third OPNFV Summit in Beijing, China (June 12-15). The event will feature both a Design Summit—where the OPNFV technical community will convene to continue working on the E-Release with plenary sessions, project breakouts, and social events—and a Summit Conference with keynotes, breakout sessions, a technology showcase, networking opportunities, and much more. More details on sponsorship, attendance and registration are available here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit.

Members of the media who would like to reserve a complimentary press pass to OPNFV Summit should contact pr@opnfv.org.

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

Open source organization unites global networking community to accelerate end-to-end NFV innovations

SAN FRANCISCO, April 27, 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 collaborative upstream development, integration, deployment, and testing, today announced the initial session agenda for its third-annual OPNFV Summit. Hosted by LF Asia, LLC, the Summit takes place June 12-15 in Beijing, and brings together key developers, communities, and organizations within the networking industry.

The largest gathering of OPNFV developers and community members from across the globe, OPNFV Summit is an ​annual ​conference ​to ​collaborate, ​innovate ​and ​explore ​the ​latest ​developments in NFV through keynotes, breakout sessions and technical workshops hosted by industry leaders in the NFV ecosystem. This year’s diverse set of session tracks include: Community and Upstream; Futures and Research; NFV Applications and Orchestration; NFV Platform Requirements; NFV Strategy and End User Stories; and Testing, Infrastructure and DevOps.

“OPNFV Summit is a collaborative forum for addressing industry needs and solving today’s most pressing problems in an open environment,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “We are pleased to host this year’s event in Beijing and leverage the tremendous industry momentum occurring in the Asia-Pacific region. We have an exciting program that includes a diverse set of presentations and discussions from speakers and participants across the globe.”

The first two days of the Summit, June 12-13, will feature a developer Design Summit where the technical community will convene to continue work on the next OPNFV release, OPNFV Euphrates. Euphrates represents the project’s fifth release, targeted for fall 2017. Plenary sessions, project breakouts, networking events, and co-located full- and half-day events from upstream projects will also be held on these days. The next two days, June 14-15, will feature a Summit conference with keynotes, breakout sessions, a technology showcase, Idea Nest, OpenStack Training, networking opportunities and much more.

For the full Summit agenda, please visit http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit/program/schedule.

Standard registration ends May 12, 2017, after which pricing increases from $350 to $450 USD. To register for the OPNFV Summit, please visit http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit/attend/registration.

Members of the media who would like to reserve a complimentary press pass to OPNFV Summit should contact pr@opnfv.org.

OPNFV Summit is made possible with generous support from sponsors, including Diamond sponsor Huawei and Platinum sponsors Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Intel, and ZTE. A full list of Summit sponsors is available here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit/sponsors/our-sponsors

About 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 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

OPNFV ‘Danube’ demonstrates ‘create, compose, deploy, test, iterate’ playbook to enable state-of-the-art open source NFV

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Open Networking Summit—April 4, 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 collaborative upstream development, integration, deployment, and testing, today announced the availability of OPNFV Danube, the project’s fourth platform release. As the demand for more robust and agile networks increases, more organizations are looking to technologies such as NFV to bring the scale and flexibility of cloud architecture to networking. The only platform that builds and integrates elements—including functional support for Management and Orchestration (MANO)—across multiple end-to-end open networking stacks, OPNFV Danube introduces key architectural components and evolutionary improvements that meet the needs of end users to enable accelerated NFV.  

“Danube represents an evolutionary turning point for OPNFV,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “It brings together full next-gen networking stacks in an open, collaborative environment. By harnessing work with upstream communities into an open, iterative testing and deployment domain, we’re delivering the capabilities that truly enable NFV, and that is very powerful.”

OPNFV Danube brings DevOps methodologies to NFV via collaborative upstream development, integration, deployment, and significant Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) testing automation. Danube also includes continued incremental improvements in baseline features, new advances in network control capabilities, and a growing focus on performance-related topics—especially NFV data plane performance, and instrumentation around MANO functions. With these updates, OPNFV empowers next-generation networking for NFV.

Key enhancements available in OPNFV Danube include:

• Foundational support and introduction of capabilities for MANO: Integration between NFV Infrastructure/Virtual Infrastructure Manager (NFVI/VIM) with Open-Orchestration (Open-O) platform (now ONAP); instrumentation of NFVI network telemetry to support Service Assurance and other use cases; multi-domain template support (Domino project); and translation features between YANG and Tosca modeling languages (Parser project).         
• Enhanced DevOps automation and testing methodologies bring a fully integrated CI/CD pipeline, the creation of Lab-as-a-Service (LaaS) to enable dynamic provisioning of lab resources, the introduction of stress testing into the OPNFV test suite, and a Common Dashboard that provides a consistent view of the testing ecosystem.
• Focus on NFV performance including acceleration of the data plane via FD.io integration for all Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding (FastDataStacks project), and continued enhancements to OVS-DPDK and KVM. The release also sees a renewed focus on performance test project activities through virtual switch testing (VSPERF project), root cause analysis for platform performance issues (Bottlenecks projects), initial compute subsystem performance testing to lay the groundwork for Benchmarking As a Service (QTIP project), and storage subsystem performance testing (Storperf project).    
• Key NFV architectural enhancements, including the ability to dynamically enable and configure network control through integration with OpenStack Gluon and increased reliability and test cases that support multi-site and High Availability (HA) work.
• Feature enrichment and hardening in core NFVI/VIM functionality such as IPv6, Service Function Chaining (SFC), L2 and L3 Virtual Private Network (VPN), fault management and analysis, and a continued commitment to support multiple hardware architectures, as well as traditional hardware OEMs, whitebox, and open source hardware through collaboration with the Open Compute Project.

“We’re seeing the culmination of over two years’ of collaborative work from across the community really come together with the release of OPNFV Danube,” said Tapio Tallgren, lead software architect in Mobile Networks Architecture & Technology, Nokia, and chair of the OPNFV Technical Steering Committee (TSC). “Things like real foundational support for MANO, OPNFV’s sophisticated testing, and DevOps and CI/CD model propel the project into a more robust industry platform for advanced open source NFV.”

Looking ahead, the next OPNFV release, labelled ‘Euphrates,’ will include even more vigorous features and capabilities. For example, the community will be expanding MANO support via collaboration with ONAP to integrate the ECOMP and Open-O code base as it matures, the cross-community CI/CD model will be enhanced, and the platform will include a focus on VNF interoperability and application enablement. OPNFV will also continue to improve native support for LXC/LXD and Kubernetes. Additionally, the project will be building out analytics capabilities through integration with both the PNDA and ONAP projects.

Information about OPNFV Danube is available here: https://www.opnfv.org/software. For information on how to participate in the OPNFV project, visit: https://www.opnfv.org.

Comments From End Users

CableLabs®
“The OPNFV Danube release is an important milestone,” said Tetsuya Nakamura, principal architect, Strategy and Innovation Group, CableLabs. “The strong integration testing enables us to utilize Danube as the basis for our NFV/SDN R&D reference platform, which we plan to use to accelerate cable industry test cases such as virtualized cable access provisioning through our subsidiary Kyrio’s interoperability lab.”

Orange
“We are looking forward to the Danube release and have started integrating the new Danube DevOps methodologies and overall OPNFV testing components into our integration center, leveraging OPNFV as a key component of our NFV platform,” said  Emmanuel Bidet, vice president, Convergent Networks Control, Orange. “We have high expectations of Danube as the fourth OPNFV release, and are happy to welcome the community for release testing during the next OPNFV Plugfest, which we’ll be hosting at the Orange Gardens near Paris, at end of April.”

Telecom Italia
“OPNFV plays a key role in the telco software-centric network transformation by rapidly building an open and integrated foundation, collaboratively working with upstream communities,” said Cecilia Corbi, senior project manager, Standard Coordination & Industry Influencing Technology department, Telecom Italia. “The Danube release represents a relevant milestone for the maturity and robustness of the platform by including advanced features and scenarios that accelerate development of NFV applications and services. Via a strong focus on continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD) and testing, coupled with many capabilities that enable network flexibility and agility, OPNFV has become an asset for telco operators as they transform their networks.”

OPNFV is onsite at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. this week, participating in various presentations and demos throughout the Summit. Learn more about OPNFV participation at ONS throughout the week.

The third OPNFV Plugfest will be held April 24-28 at the campus of member company Orange in Chatillon, France. The event will focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in three key areas of testing: OPNFV Deployment, Network Integration, and VNF Applications. Both OPNFV members and non-members are welcome to attend.

OPNFV is hosting its third OPNFV Summit in Beijing, China (June 12-15). The event will feature both a Design Summit—where the OPNFV technical community will convene to continue working on the E-Release with plenary sessions, project breakouts, and social events—and a Summit Conference with keynotes, breakout sessions, a technology showcase, networking opportunities, and much more. More details on sponsorship, attendance and registration are available here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit

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
Get Involved
Download OPNFV Danube
OPNFV Resources
OPNFV Blog

Open Source NFV project expands its member base as global telecom, wireless, digital media, and research organizations commit to accelerating open source NFV

SAN FRANCISCO, November 2, 2016 — 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 four new member organizations.

New Silver members include China Telecom,Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm, Inc., and Samsung Electronics, while the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) joins as an Associate member. The addition of an end user organization, a research institution and two major global vendors signals a maturing of both the project and NFV as technology. Launched just over two years ago, the OPNFV project is supported by a vibrant group of 55 member companies committed to advancing a flexible, open source framework for NFV.

“Continued growth and diversity among our member roster is a testament to the growing power of open, collaborative development within the networking industry,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “I’m honored to welcome China Telecom, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Qualcomm, and Samsung Electronics to the project. Together with our existing member base and strong community, these key organizations will help accelerate the adoption of open source NFV.”

About the newest members

China Telecom Corporation Limited is one of the world’s largest and leading integrated information service operators, providing wireline and mobile telecommunications services, Internet access services, information services, and other value-added telecommunications services primarily in the People’s Republic of China. At the end of 2015, the company had wireline access lines in service of about 134 million customers, wireline broadband subscribers of about 113 million, and mobile subscribers of about 198 million.

“China Telecom has long supported NFV technologies and we strongly believe in the power of open source to both accelerate development and reduce complexity,” said Shen Shaoai, vice general manager of Technology Department, China Telecom. “Joining OPNFV and working more collaboratively across the industry is crucial as we strive to virtualize 80 percent of our network functions by 2025. We’re looking forward to contributing our expertise to help build a strong, open NFV platform.”

With more than 25 years of experience, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) has a long history in building Next Generation Network Infrastructures with tier one operators and key manufactures worldwide. Research concentrates on technical infrastructure as well as the development of practical concepts, prototypes, and applications in a pre-competitive environment. In this context open source toolkits developed by FOKUS, such as the SIP Express Router and the Open Source IMS Core, as well as the most recent Open Baton platform, have been landmarks for performing initial PoCs and paving the way for efficient and successful network and service transformation towards 5G. With around 430 employees, FOKUS is one of the largest Fraunhofer institutes.

“As networks transform and become more agile, it’s important that the industry come together to work collectively on open solutions,” said Dr. Thomas Magedanz, director of the Software-based Networks business unit at Fraunhofer FOKUS. “We’re excited to be joining the OPNFV community as a natural step for contributing our resources and expertise in areas such as MANO that will help to build a stronger open source NFV platform globally.”

Qualcomm Incorporated is a world leader in 3G, 4G and next-generation wireless technologies. For more than 30 years, Qualcomm ideas and inventions have driven the evolution of digital communications, linking people everywhere more closely to information, entertainment and each other.

“Rapid evolution in the way people consume data, especially as we move towards 5G, requires agile and scalable solutions to meet the increasing demands of the world’s networks,” Ram Peddibhotla, senior director, product management, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc. “Through our collaboration in the OPNFV community, we’re eager to harness the power of open source to accelerate open network transformation.”

Samsung Electronics inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies. The Company is redefining the worlds of TVs, smartphones, wearable devices,tablets, cameras, digital appliances, printers, medical equipment, network systems, and semiconductor and LED solutions.

“Explosive demand for data requires the networking ecosystem to constantly reinvent itself with the introduction of new technologies and innovations,” said Woojune Kim, vice president and head of strategy group, Next Generation Communication Team at Samsung Electronics.“We believe in an open approach to addressing the growing reliance on virtualized technologies like NFV. Joining OPNFV will help enable faster and broader adoption of more interoperable network infrastructures, and we look forward to working collaboratively across the industry.”

For information on on how to participate in the OPNFV project or to learn more about OPNFV Colorado, the project’s third and most recent platform release, visit: https://www.opnfv.org.

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 Colorado lays foundation for NFV applications and services via key feature enhancements, greater integration and additional testing capabilities

SAN FRANCISCO, September 26, 2016 — 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 Colorado, the project’s third platform release. Built on a strong underlying foundation, Colorado includes critical advances that accelerate the development of NFV applications and services through key feature enhancements across security, IPv6, Service Function Chaining (SFC), testing, VPN capabilities, and support for multiple hardware architectures.

“Colorado represents a more robust version of OPNFV’s previous Brahmaputra platform,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “The OPNFV community, in close collaboration with other upstream communities, has delivered enhanced capabilities most important to the NFV platform growth and maturity.”

Key enhancements available in OPNFV Colorado include:

• Core feature upgrades. These improvements come via focused collaboration with upstream communities and are centered on improving foundational support for NFV applications and services. All feature enhancements are integrated into the automated install/deploy/testing framework.
  • Enhanced security by earning the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge for best practices in open source development; additionally, the Moon project has been prototyping identity federation and management for OpenStack and OpenDaylight.
  • Service Function Chaining (SFC) now runs across multiple nodes, includes installer support for VNF Manager (Tacker) installation and support for enhanced cloud scenarios.
  • Improved IPv6 support includes IPv6-only deployments, full underlay and overlay support and integration with additional install tools.
  • The SDN VPN project now enables full Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN support including BGP peering.
  • Full support for multiple hardware architectures, including both ARM® and x86 architectures.
• Enhanced testing capabilities. Colorado includes a greater integration across testing projects with additional feature testing capabilities, and increased automation.
• Infrastructure and testing environment advancements. The Phros Test Lab project continues to be a key element of OPNFV release development and validation. Colorado brings increased governance, consistency, availability and quality to the labs, increasing efficiency and ccreating the groundwork for a robust Lab-as-a-Service program. See the full list of Pharos labs –including those participating in Colorado–here.
• Community expansion. Improved cross-project collaboration via working groups focused on Management and Operation (MANO), Infrastructure, Security, and Testing. Five Committers-At-Large members have been elected to the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) to enhance the meritocratic nature of the project. OPNFV also continues to build relationships with key upstream communities such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenContrail, FD.io, OVS, Open-O, OpenBaton, KVM, DPDK, ODP, and Linux. Additionally, OPNFV launched its intern program during the Colorado release timeframe, already providing valuable contributions across work on the Pharos Labs, VNF on-boarding and CINDR performance testing.
• Efficient network forwarding. Colorado introduces scenarios created by the FastDataStacks project which include the VPP software supplied bu the FD.io project to enable high-performance networking for NFV. More information on FastDataStacks can be found here.

“We’re seeing a maturity of process with the Colorado release, reflected by things like achievement of the CII Best Practices badge for security and the growing maturity of our testing and DevOps methodology,” said Chris Price, TSC chair, OPNFV and Open Source Manager for SDN, Cloud & NFV, Ericsson. “The creation of working groups across MANO, Infrastructure, Security, and Testing also help the project evolve towards a foundational and robust industry platform for advanced open source NFV.”

In addition to enhanced features and capabilities of the platform, the third OPNFV release has provided an opportunity for the community to become even more fluent in system level feature development and testing in support of NFV. This will be crucial in moving past the initial groundwork and into ease-of-deployment and end-user engagement as the platform continues to mature. Colorado sets the stage for significant new work in the MANO area including efforts focused on VNF on-boarding, increased CI/CD integration with upstream communities and ongoing NFV-related feature enhancements that will further accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks.

OPNFV is at the OpenDaylight Summit in Seattle this week, September 27-29. The community will participate in various presentations throughout the Summit and will host an OPNFV MeetUp onsite.

The second OPNFV Plugfest will be held December 5-9, 2016 at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab in Durham, New Hampshire. The event will focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in three key areas of testing: OPNFV Deployment, Network Integration, and VNF Applications. Both OPNFV members and non-members are welcome to attend.

Information about OPNFV Colorado is available here: https://www.opnfv.org/colorado.

To learn more about OPNFV Colorado, or for information on how to participate in the OPNFV project, visit: https://www.opnfv.org.

Comments from key project contributors:

Bob Monkman, project technical lead for Armband project and segment marketing manager at ARM:

“OPNFV Colorado is an important new release as it continues the momentum towards a future-proof network based on multi-architectural solutions. The OPNFV Project is rapidly building an open, mature and integrated foundation to deliver NFV and we are engaged on a number of fronts, importantly on the Armband Project in open developer labs around the world.”

Bin Hu, Project Technical Lead for IPv6 project and PMTS at AT&T:

“With Colorado, we expanded upon the existing IPv6 support in Brahmaputra to now include overlay and underlay support and added support for additional install tools, including Apex, so support IPv6-only deployments.  An important step for the platform, this brings advantages such as more efficient routing, more efficient packet processing, direct data flows, simplified network configuration, and enhanced security provided by a rapidly-growing IPv6 underlay infrastructure.”

Frank Brockners, Project Technical Lead for the FastDataStacks project and Distinguished Engineer, Cisco:

“To date, NFV stacks have been missing an esasy-to-extend, feature-rich, high-performance/scale virtual switch-router –integrated into a versatile stack architecture that can work with a variety of software and hardware forwarders. In Colorado with the FastDataStacks project, we have now overcome this hurdle and introduced a first OPNFV scenario that integrates the vector packet processor (VPP) as supplied by the FD.io project while leveraging OpenDaylight Group-Based Policy (BGP) as the integration vehicle.”

Brady Johnson, Project Technical Lead for SFC project and Principal Software Engineer at Ericsson:

“In the OPNFV Colorado release, SFC improves on the foundation laid in the Brahmaputra release by enhancing the stability of most of the upstream components that make up the project. We can now support more flexible and multi-node NSH networking scenarios. OPNFV, working with upstream teams, can now enable scenarios and network agility important to end users.”

Luke Hinds, Key project lead, CII Best Practice Badge and principal software engineer, RedHat:

“Security of the OPNFV ecosystem is critical to the trust and integrity of our community’s endeavor. The security posture of OPNFV is enhanced in Colorado by achievement of the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge for best practices, and a full security code audit carried out by the OPNFV security working group. Colorado also includes two new security projects that set more secure standards movin forward: the Moon project prototypes identity federation for OpenStack and OpenDaylight and a second project which performs automated CI NFVi Security Scanning.”

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 Colorado

OPNFV Resources

OPNFV Blog

Registration, sponsorship information available for 3rd Annual OPNFV Summit to take place in Beijing, China, June 12-15, 2017

SAN FRANCISCO, September 6, 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 the 2017 OPNFV Summit will be held in Beijing, China, June 12-15, 2017 at the JW Marriott Beijing. The Summit provides an opportunity to reach the innovative communities, developers and companies transforming the networking industry through open source NFV.

Registration for the 2017 OPNFV Summit is available here. Those interested in sponsoring the event can find more details here. Additional information, including the Call for Proposals, agendas and co-located events will be available in the coming months, so check the OPNFV Summit website for updates.

“With such a growing and vibrant global community, we’re looking forward to holding our 2017 OPNFV Summit in Beijing,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “Our community is truly global, with strong contributions and growth from across Asia. Hosting our next Summit in China will allow an even broader participation in OPNFV from developers, end users, academia and others passionate about transforming the network.”

The second OPNFV Summit, held June 20-23, 2016 in Berlin, was a great success with 620 attendees from across the NFV ecosystem. A recap of the event, including presentation slides, videos, photos and more, are available here: https://www.opnfv.org/opnfv-summit-2016-event-recap.

About 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.

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Media Inquires

Jill Lovato
OPNFV Project
pr@opnfv.org

Open Source NFV project leverages real-world expertise of key networking experts from leading carriers and service providers including AT&T, China Mobile, Cox Communications, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Sprint and more  

 SAN FRANCISCO, August 18, 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 the project has formed an End User Advisory Group (EUAG) consisting of end-user organizations from both OPNFV members and nonmembers to provide technical guidance to the OPNFV developer community.

Founding members include:

• AT&T’s Toby Ford, assistant vice president of Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Architecture and Strategy; Bryan Sullivan, director of Open Source Strategy; and Steven Wright, lead member of Technical Staff
• British Telecom’s Milind Bhagwat, enterprise architect and technology strategy lead
• CableLabs’ Don Clarke, principal network architect; Randy Levensalor, lead software architect; and Tetsuya Nakamura, principal systems architect
• China Mobile’s Lingli Deng, project manager
• China Unicom’s Chuan Jia and Junjie Tong from the Network Technology Research Institute of China Unicom, Department of Network Technology Research
• Cox Communications’ Guy Meador, senior strategic architect; and Jeff Finkelstein, executive director of Advanced Access Architecture
• Deutsche Telekom’s Herbert Damker, senior expert, Group Technology
• Fidelity Investment’s Carlos Matos, director of global network architecture
• Liberty Global’s Uzari Firoze, manager, Business-to-Business Network Design
• KDDI’s Hajime Miyamoto, senior engineer and Kenichi Ogaki, assistant manager
• KDDI Lab’s Masanori Miyazawa, research manager
• Orange’s Morgan Richomme, NFV architect
• SK Telecom’s Sungho Jo, head of 5G Tech Lab, Network Technology R&D Center
• Sprint’s Serge Manning, senior technology strategist, Global Standards
• Telecom Italia’s Cecilia Corbi, standardization manager
• Telefonica’s Diego Lopez, senior technology expert
• Telia Company’s Johan Gustawsson, network architect, SDN and NFV
• Vodafone Group’s David Amzallag, group head of Network Virtualization, SDN and NFV; and Kodi Atuchukwu, network virtualisation architect, Vodafone Ocean

Created to provide a forum for end users to assist and support the project’s objectives by providing technical and strategic guidance to the OPNFV governing bodies (including the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), the Board of Directors and the Certification & Compliance Committee), the EUAG is comprised of members experienced in running some of the world’s most cutting-edge networks.

“The formation of the OPNFV EUAG will harness the knowledge and expertise of those responsible for actually running real-world networks as they deploy and scale,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “Feedback from the ecosystem using and deploying NFV is crucial to the future direction of OPNFV. Engaging these pioneers will help us address the most pressing pain points for the industry and build a platform with broad applicability.”

The EUAG meets monthly to discuss key challenges, standards, network architecture, and emerging use cases related to NFV. The first meeting was held June 26, 2016 and the next meeting is scheduled for August 31. The group is chaired by AT&T’s Steven Wright, who will serve a two-year term while delegates may serve for as long as they like. EUAG member eligibility includes individuals at network operators (service providers–cloud or network, telco or cable operators, enterprises, government or educational institutions) who have current or prior experience in a) management of a production deployed network, b) architecting of a production deployed network, or c) serving as network software or hardware decision maker.

“AT&T values the industry interoperability efforts pioneered by OPNFV to enable a VNF ecosystem,” said Steven Wright, lead member of technical staff at AT&T and chair of the OPNFV EUAG. “We are excited to be more active in this community by contributing code directly and with vendors.”

More details on the OPNFV EUAG can be found here, including the group’s Wiki page, official Charter and Member Agreement. EUAG meeting minutes are public and posted to the EUAG wiki page. New members are welcome to join the group at any time; requests to join and questions should be sent to: user-advisory@opnfv.org.

Comments from founding OPNFV EUAG members (in alphabetical order by company name)

Milind Bhagwat, British Telecom: “BT has been instrumental in the development of NFV and continues to heavily leverage this technology to make our network services more dynamic. We’ve learned that integration between legacy and new implementations is critical in determining the speed at which networks can be transformed. I’m pleased to be able to bring BT’s experience and perspectives to the OPNFV EUAG.”

Don Clarke, CableLabs: “CableLabs is tasked with developing technologies and standards on behalf of the cable industry. As a founding member of OPNFV we are keen to see the community address the needs of network operators for a reliable and replicable NFV platform based on open source. The EUAG will enable end users to share their experience with the platform, and provide useful guidance to the community on priorities for focused and timely development.”

Lingli Deng, China Mobile: “OPNFV continues to gain more experience with integration and delivering more and more stable and mature releases. End users are able to provide invaluable insights into deploying OPNFV releases, business demands and their impact on the network, and conducting PoCs/trials. This greatly benefits the community and helps ensure practical and successful OPNFV deployments.”

Morgan Richomme, Orange: “Orange has been involved in OPNFV since day one. We are actively contributing to several projects around the ecosystem and actually speeding up the selection process of the best open source components for NFV. The OPNFV EUAG will be the perfect place to get in touch with business owners, share best practices and concerns. As a contributor, we expect the initiative to help consolidate our position, especially in the testing area. Another goal is also to encourage end users to contribute more in order to shape OPNFV for the enterprise.”

Serge Manning, Sprint: “This advisory group will be an important forum for those of us in the trenches – the technologists that are running real-world networks – to guide and accelerate the adoption of open source NFV.”

Diego Lopez, Telefonica: “The open playground OPNFV aims to establish is a very valuable element of a thriving ecosystem for NFV, easing the collection of requirements for upstream projects like OSM, and facilitating their validation and experimentation by potential users. Furthermore, OPNFV provides an interesting common ground for further research activities in the NFV technologies themselves and in advanced application environments like 5G.”

Johan Gustawsson, Telia Company: “By engaging directly with a handful of OPNFV upstream projects and witnessing its broad industry traction, it’s clear the project is highly credible and brings together various components to accelerate the development and adoption of an open end-to-end platform for NFV. Through this newly formed advisory group, I believe we can achieve a strong level of engagement and collaboration with operator peers and the broader community to address common challenges.”

OPNFV recently hosted its annual Summit in Berlin on June 22-23, 2016. The Summit brought together 620 members of the OPNFV community including network operators, vendors,  developers and end users. Eighteen service provider companies–including several from our EUAG– were in attendance to participate in a keynote panel, six PoC Demos, and as speakers in more than 25 track sessions. To watch OPNFV Director Heather 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

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

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Jill Lovato
OPNFV Project
pr@opnfv.org