ONOS' Partner Involvement Accelerates to Deliver Increased Infrastructure Functionality for SDN and NFV Use Case Enablement

MENLO PARK, Calif., Sept. 22, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- ONOS' community today announced the availability of the fourth release of its open source SDN Open Network Operating System (ONOS), named Drake, that is focused on infrastructure enhancements for further SDN and NFV use case enablement. Providing the high availability and scale-out required for carrier grade performance, Drake adds new security, configuration and application level feature sets with improvements to the northbound and southbound including REST, API and GUI additions and upgrades throughout. In addition to contributing to ONF's Atrium, ONOS has expanded collaboration with other open source communities to develop new distributions including work with the CloudRouter® Project and it will soon be part of the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV).

While ONOS members are only required to donate two engineers each to the project, it now has an average of 10 to 15 contributing engineers per firm with AT&T, Ciena, Ericsson, Huawei, and SK Telecom all increasing development team sizes significantly. The ecosystem of firms funding and contributing to the ONOS initiative now includes the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Korea (ETRI). ETRI has chosen ONOS as its primary SDN operating system for development and, with KREONET and KISTI, is also exceeding the required engineering resources that it dedicates to development.

"The ONOS community's contributions are accelerating rapidly," said Bill Snow, vice president of engineering at the ONOS Project. "ONOS' open source community delivers new product enhancements and apps at the tremendous rate required to address the complexities of deploying carrier-grade SDN. Our research and education network deployments and global collaboration stimulate the development of innovative applications and ideas that enable us to successfully harden ONOS for carrier grade production environments."

Drake is available now at the ONOS downloads page here:
https://wiki.onosproject.org/display/ONOS/Download+packages+and+tutorial+VMs.

In SDN, there are multiple surfaces that have to be addressed for security purposes. There is a lot of interest around how the controller and OS are secured, with the northbound being among the most critical for people accessing REST-based interfaces via the controller. Drake adds significant levels of security to the apps and APIs accessing ONOS. By default, ONOS' GUI and REST-based interfaces are now secured. SRI International and KAIST developed an early implementation of secure bundles called Security Mode ONOS for Drake. Transport Layer Security has been added for the east/west-bound communications and the Command Line Interface can also be secured for authenticated password-less access using public/private keys.

At the application level, Drake has several new additions. Building on top of the general tunnel subsystem Huawei previously contributed to ONOS, the company has laid the foundation for future VXLAN  support by supplying a VTN manager and VXLAN tunnel setup that aligns with OPNFV standards. Drake delivers the functions and building blocks required for ONOS to merge with the next version of OPNFV and will allow future use cases including NFV management and orchestration and the delivery of VNFaaS. ONOS' OPNFV functionality is the result of collaboration between these two vital open source communities.

ETRI delivered a subsystem for adaptive flow statistics collection to smartly sample flows without overwhelming the collection system as flows increase with scale. Criterion Networks contributed an IPv6 intents test suite available to the community to support apps while building on top of ONOS' IPv6 support. Ericsson contributed the beginning of an analytics subsystem that collects data and stores it in a database so it may be analyzed and fed back into the system as automated actions. This specific Ericsson contribution is targeted for ONOS' CORD use case to take information from the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD) so ONOS can feed actions back into CORD.

Drake also adds GUI topology overlays for improved link highlighting, secure login via user interface, a virtual network resource manager, and a new DHCP server app capable of operating in an OpenFlow SDN environment.

ONOS delivers rich northbound and southbound abstractions. Working in the northbound, when reserving flows in IP or optical networking they can have different semantics for different types of domains such as Ethernet, OTN, P-OTS, SONET/SDH and others. Drake adds the building blocks for a new northbound intent abstraction that will simplify the setup of cross domain constructs, or flows, and allows users to more easily address a particular domain with an intent. This eliminates the need for higher level coordination functions that operators would otherwise require to fuse these disparate flows together. This is part of the new network configuration subsystem so that all ONOS apps can ultimately be configured from a central repository and it lays the foundation for a larger resource reservation subsystem. Fujitsu provided extensive assistance with Drake's northbound and Huawei provided the OpenStack Neutron ML2 interface.

In the southbound, Drake adds YANG ACL for NETCONF from Happiest Minds and PCEP and OVSDB plug-ins from Huawei. Drake begins laying the foundation for IGMP snooping with PIM-SSM and Multicast forward app enhancements from DirecTV; OpenFlow QoS meter support; and a metrics collection subsystem to collect information from devices and ports in the data plane. 

Drake also adds a new configuration subsystem that enables the configuration of multiple apps instead of having to use individual configuration files for each one. This delivers a central configuration utility so that operators can go to one place and setup configuration, not just for the ONOS' core but for all apps. The new subsystem makes it much easier to deploy and manage apps, enables simplified use and will allow easy access to a more diverse app ecosystem.

About the ONOS project
ONOS is the open source SDN networking operating system for Service Provider networks architected for high performance, scale and availability. ONOS' ecosystem comprises of ON.Lab and organizations that are funding and contributing to the ONOS initiative. These include AT&T, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, China Unicom, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel and NEC; members who are collaborating and contributing to ONOS include ONF, Infoblox, SRI, Internet2, Happiest Minds, KISTI, KAIST, Kreonet, NAIM, CNIT, Black Duck, Create-Net, Criterion Networks and the broader ONOS community. Learn how you can get involved with ONOS at onosproject.org.

Press Contact
Bob Eastwood, Engage PR for ON.Lab, 510-748-8200 x215,
[email protected]

ON.Lab & ONOS Contact
Ram Appalaraju, Strategic Advisor for ON.Lab, [email protected]

SOURCE ON.Lab

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