OpenDaylight Introduces ‘Boron’ SDN Platform Release

Source of the news: https://www.opendaylight.org/news/foundation-news/2016/09/opendaylight-project-releases-boron-network-driven-businesses

The OpenDaylight Project, the leading open source platform for programmable, software-defined networks, today announced its fifth open Software-Defined Networking (SDN) release, OpenDaylight Boron. With this release, OpenDaylight marks a new milestone in technology and community maturity. Boron is the result of major user-led contributions and engagement, with significant enhancements to Cloud and NFV use-case capabilities, as well as to performance and tooling to simplify management of a range of use cases.

“Since its inception in 2013, OpenDaylight has served to unite the industry around a common SDN platform,” said Neela Jacques, Executive Director, OpenDaylight. “With Boron, the OpenDaylight platform cements its position as the de facto standard platform for building next-generation networking solutions. Boron further develops and standardizes support for the industry’s leading use cases, while facilitating development of innovative new approaches to solving network-related business challenges. From the world’s biggest telco networks to webscale giants and even the Large Hadron Collider, OpenDaylight is at the heart of more and more SDN solutions and production infrastructures.”

User-Led Innovation in Boron

OpenDaylight’s fifth release saw an unprecedented level of engagement from users directly within the development process. More than half of the new projects proposed came from user organizations, including:

• YangIDE, led by AT&T, provides support for building new YANG models
• Telefonica and Intel-led NetIDE, which makes it easier to share apps across controller deployments
• EMAN, led by Comcast, for improved energy efficiency for the network

As deployments grow in scale and sophistication, end-users are increasingly looking to integrate OpenDaylight more deeply into their core architectural frameworks. One example of cross-industry collaborations is the Atrium Enterprise project which was led by the Open Networking Foundation with participation from Criterion Networks, WIPRO and Microsoft. Another example is  ECOMP, from AT&T, an infrastructure delivery platform and scalable, comprehensive network cloud service for a software-centric network.

“We’re excited to see the release of OpenDaylight Boron,” said Chris Rice, SVP of Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design at AT&T. “We contributed to the release and expect to use the code at the heart of our network. We like OpenDaylight for the breadth of ‘brownfield’ protocols that are supported, its model driven approach that matches our service abstraction logic, and the ability to add applications on top of the controller base. One of the tenets of the open source community is that you don’t just take code. You contribute it, as well. We’re committed to doing just that, and this is an example.”

New Depth for Network Engineering, Production Cloud Use Cases

Boron provides several enhancements to evolve OpenDaylight’s support for Cloud and NFV. OpenStack-related capabilities have been re-architected within a unified development framework for better scalability and performance, including clustering, High Availability (HA), and persistence. Southbound enhancements for VNFs include OpenFlow and NETCONF optimization, as well as hardware VTEP support, and DPDK enhancements.

The NetVirt project brings new focus to features and performance to OpenStack environments. These include improved coordination between OpenStack Neutron and the controller, as well as enhanced support for IPv6, Security Groups (via OpenFlow configuration), VLANs and other important capabilities. The new architecture enables the ability to grow beyond OpenStack integration by allowing control from other orchestration systems and applications.

As a crucial downstream consumer of ODL’s platform, the OPNFV project has driven a broad set of Telco requirements and new functionality in OpenDaylight. As Service Function Chaining has become a key required capability of NFV deployments, collaboration between ODL and OPNFV SFC-focused projects have led to a number of key improvements including Proof of Transit validating service chain packet-flow, enhancements to support FD.io Service Chain Identification and support for the latest OVS release.

In addition, the Genius project, a community-wide effort, provides an app-agnostic framework for application composition. This supports the deployment of modular distributed applications as well as Service Function Chaining (SFC). First introduced as a “proof of concept” project in Beryllium, Genius is now application-agnostic and can be used to operate production cloud networks.

“With the Boron release, we focused a lot of effort on enhancing core platform resilience and building the control plane capabilities, which is crucial as the project scales,” said Colin Dixon, OpenDaylight’s Technical Steering Committee Chair and Distinguished Engineer at Brocade. “As the platform has matured and more OpenDaylight-based solutions are reaching production, we’ve been able to leverage not only feedback, but an increase in engagement from a growing number of end users. This in an important step as it accelerates our ability to meet the real-world functionality, robustness and interoperability needs of end users.”

Enhanced Performance and Tooling Ease Management

The community continues to enhance capabilities of the various southbound plug-ins while also standardizing how protocols such as OpenFlow, BGP and BGP-VPN are used, and how to model them effectively.

SDN application developers will find a number of improvements that make Boron an accessible platform.  New clustering features in Boron simplify HA management for non-distributed network applications, make it easier for developers to write applications without needing to understand the underlying architecture.

Additionally, controller health is easy to monitor with the Cardinal project, which provides controller health data as a service. Time Series Data Repository (TSDR) and the Centinel project enable Big Data Analytics for streaming data.

Learn more about OpenDaylight Boron at the OpenDaylight Summit on September 27-29 in Seattle. With more than 40 sessions focused on Boron, the OpenDaylight Summit is the best place to learn more about the platform, share knowledge and connect with the industry. To register for the Summit and view the full schedule, visit here.

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