AT&T confirmed that it is committed to releasing into open source its current Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform, which is the service orchestration system that powers the AT&T software-defined network (SDN).
AT&T said ECOMP is mature, feature-complete, and tested in real-world NFV deployments. The company believes open source ECOMP will bring maturity to SDN and become the industry standard for orchestration, management and policy control.
By releasing the ECOMP code as open source, AT&T said other service providers will be able to use this software to meet non-stop network demands as data-hungry technologies like autonomous cars, augmented and virtual reality, 4K video and the Internet of Things (IoT) take off.
“In March, we opened the hood of our network, showed you the engine and the industry responded asking to join us,” said John Donovan, Chief Strategy Officer and Group President, Technology and Operations, AT&T. “Over the last few years, AT&T invented what we believe to be the most sophisticated, comprehensive and scalable software-centric network in the world. Today, we’re letting anyone use and build upon our millions of lines of software code by committing to releasing it into the open source community.”
“This is a big decision and getting it right is crucial,” Donovan continues. “We want to build a community – where people contribute to the code base and advance the platform. And, we want this to help align the global industry. We’ve engaged a third-party company to be the integrator and provide support in the industry for the ECOMP platform. And we’ve received positive feedback from major global telecom companies. We’re excited to share more on that front very soon.”
http://about.att.com/story/network_playbook_into_open_source.html
AT&T’s ECOMP is its Next Big Thing
AT&T is moving quickly to transform itself into a software company, said John Donovan, Chief Strategy Officer, in a keynote at the sixth annual Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California. Last year, AT&T hit its target of virtualizing 5% of its network functions. This year, the company aims to increase its NFV rollout to 30% of network fuctions. This includes some 39 VNFs going into the production infrastructure. As of today, 14 million wireless customers are on AT&T’s fully virtualized mobile packet core
Some additional highlights:
- AT&T next big thing is ECOMP – Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management & Policy) Architecture. Donovan describes ECOMP as the most sophisticated software project that AT&T has ever undertaken — the engine that powers its software-centric network. The goal is to enable high utilization of network resources by combining dynamic, policy-enforced functions forcomponent and workload shaping, placement, execution, and administration. Over the past 18 months, a team of 300 AT&T developers has assembled 8 million lines of codes. It is designed to interoperate with Open Stack. AT&T has just published a whitepaper (link below) on ECOMP and is inviting industry commentary. If there enough community interest, AT&T is considering making ECOMP open source.
- AT&T continues to make progress on Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD), which was first showcased at ONS last year. The idea behind CORD is to use SDN and NFV to transform carrier functions into workloads that are hosted on common, commodity infrastructure. AT&T trials for CORD begin this month.
- AT&T has doubled its usage of open source software in the past year. The company is participating in many open source initiatives and has just joined the Open Compute Project.
- Donovan sees virtual reality as being a huge driver of bandwidth
- Regarding competition and/or cooperation with other big cloud providers, Donovan said AT&T is comfortable with its role as owner/operator of its infrastructure.
- AT&T is now serving 26 million IoT devices.
- 60% of AT&T total network traffic is video
- AT&T is carrying more than 114 petabytes on its network daily.
