ONOS Project and ONF Develop Leaf-Spine Fabric

The ONOS Project, which is the open source SDN Network Operating System (ONOS) for service providers and mission-critical networks and hosted by the Linux Foundation, and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) have collaborated to develop a leaf-spine fabric solution for data centers and service provider Central Offices.

The effort has resulted in the first L2/L3 leaf-spine fabric on bare-metal switching hardware that is built with SDN principles and open source software.

“Underlay and overlay fabrics represent important ONOS use cases,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director of ON.Lab. “ONOS Project, in partnership with ONF and several active ONOS collaborators, have delivered a highly flexible, economical and scalable solution as software defined data centers gain momentum. This is also a great example of collaboration between ONF and ON.Lab to create open source solutions for the industry.”

“This is an L2/L3 SDN fabric with state-of-the-art white box hardware and completely open source switch, controller and application software,” said Saurav Das, principal architect at the Open Networking Foundation. “No traditional networking protocols found in commercial solutions are used inside the fabric, which instead uses an integrated SDN-based solution. In the past, the promise of SDN has fallen short in delivering HA, scale and performance. The fabric control application design, together with ONOS, and the full use of modern merchant silicon ASICs solve all of these problems. In addition, the use of SDN affords a high degree of customizability for rapidly introducing newer features in the fabric. CORD’s usage of the fabric is an excellent example of such customization.”

Some highlights:

• The fabric is built on Edgecore bare-metal hardware from the Open Compute Project (OCP) and switch software, including OCP’s Open Network Linux and Broadcom’s OpenFlow Data Plane Abstraction (OF-DPA) API. 
• It leverages earlier work from ONF’s Atrium and SPRING-OPEN projects that implemented segment-routed networks using SDN.
• It offers HA and scale support with multi-instance ONOS controller cluster (previous work was with single-controller)
• vRouter for interfacing with traditional networks using BGP and/or OSPF
• CORD’s vOLT for residential access network support
• Support for IPv4 Multicast forwarding for residential IPTV streams in CORD
• Integration with CORD’s XOS-based orchestration framework

http://onosproject.org/