Category Archives: OPNFV

News & Analysis, OPNFV, Virtualisation

OPNFV announces second major release – Brahmaputra

Digital illustration of Cloud computing devicesThe Linux Foundation-inspired OPNFV Project has taken a new step closer to its ideal of network liberalisation with a new release of its software.

Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), the telecoms industry’s answer to the Stock Market’s Big Bang, aims to open the market for creating software that runs the multitude of functions within any network. The OPNFV Project aims to create a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform that uses NFV to create telecoms networks that are infinitely more flexible and adaptable than the traditional proprietary systems that locked the software within the rigid backbone of telecoms hardware.

The Project has announced the availability of new improved version of its original offering, code-named Arno, which Telecoms.com reported on in June 2015. The new release, Brahmaputra, offers a more comprehensive standard of tools for testing NFV functionality and use cases. Brahmaputra is OPNFV’s first full experience with a massively parallel simultaneous release process and helps developers to collaborate with upstream communities. By encouraging group collaboration on feature development and addressing multiple technology components across the ecosystem, the Project aims to improve the stability, performance and automation of the system, and to consolidate its features.

The extent of collaboration is ambitious, since OPNFV aims to bring together at least 165 developers from network operators, solution providers and vendors. The focus of their joint efforts will be on integration, deployment and the testing of upstream components to meet NFV’s needs. During the integration process to create the Brahmaputra release, code was contributed by programme writers in the OpenStack, OpenDaylight, OpenContrail ONOS and ETSI developer communities. Meanwhile, there were 30 different projects accepted which created new powers, specifications and community resources to the system.

Among the improvements are Layer 3 VPN instantiation and configuration, initial support for IPv6 deployment and testing in IPv6 environments, better fault detection and recovery, performance boosts through data plane acceleration and much fuller infrastructure testing.

“The strength of any open source project depends on the community developing it,” said OPNFV director Heather Kirksey, “with an entire industry involved in the development of NFV, we’re seeing more collaboration and the strides we made in Brahmaputra create a framework for even more developers to come together.”

network functions virtualisation, Networks, News & Analysis, NFV, OPNFV

OPNFV announces first major software release

OPNFV has launched the first version of its NFV platform

OPNFV has launched the first version of its NFV platform

Linux Foundation driven open source NFV organisation OPNFV has announced the availability of the first version of its software, which it is calling Arno, reports Telecoms.com.

OPNFV was formed just eight months ago by a group of NFV veterans including Chairman Prodip Sen, who was at Verizon and now also heads up NFV at HP. Its aim is to develop an open platform for NFV, which in turn should accelerate the growth of the technology and shorten the time to market for NFV solutions.

As the first release Arno, which commences a sequence of river-based names the second of which will presumably begin with B, is aimed at those exploring NFV deployments. It provides an initial build of the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) components of ETSI NFV architecture.

“Only eight months after its formation, OPNFV has met one of its major goals by creating an integrated build, deployment and testing environment that accelerates NFV implementation and interoperability,” said Sen. “With Arno, we now have a solid foundation for testing some of the key resource orchestration and network control components for NFV. This is great a testament to the power of an open source collaborative model and the strength of the NFV ecosystem.”

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of what Arno (which is available to download here) brings to the table, according to the OPNFV announcement:

  • Availability of baseline platform: Arno enables continuous integration, automated deployment and testing of components from upstream projects such as Ceph, KVM, OpenDaylight, OpenStack and Open vSwitch. It allows developers and users to automatically install and explore the platform.
  • Ability to deploy and test various VNFs: End users and developers can deploy their own or third party VNFs on Arno to test its functionality and performance in various traffic scenarios and use cases.
  • Availability of test infrastructure in community-hosted labs: Agile testing plays a crucial role in the OPNFV platform. With Arno, the project is unveiling a community test labs infrastructure where users can test the platform in different environments and on different hardware. This test labs infrastructure enables the platform to be exercised in different NFV scenarios to ensure that the various open source components come together to meet vendor and end user needs.
  • Allows automatic continuous integration of specific components: As upstream projects are developed independently they require testing of various OPNFV use cases to ensure seamless integration and interworking within the platform. OPNFV’s automated toolchain allows continuous automatic builds and verification.