The OpenDaylight Project announced its third open SDN software release — Lithium.
OpenDaylight is a highly available, modular, extensible, scalable and multi-protocol controller infrastructure built for SDN deployments on modern heterogeneous multi-vendor networks. OpenDaylight provides a model-driven service abstraction platform that allows users to write apps that easily work across a wide variety of hardware and southbound protocols.
New features and improvements in the OpenDaylight Lithium release include:
- Increased scalability and performance. OpenDaylight’s Integration Group spent significant time testing against end user-defined use cases and requirements to boost scalability and performance of core architectural components in Lithium.
- Network services for cloud data center platforms. Native support for the OpenStack Neutron framework combined with features such as SFC, Virtual Tenant Networking (VTN) and Group-Based Policy (GBP) allow users to easily design device, user and group-level policies including customized service chains for firewall, load balancing and other application network services.
- New features for security and automation. Unified Secure Channel eases secure communication between OpenDaylight and widely distributed networking equipment; Time Series Data Repository (TSDR) enables collection and analysis of large amounts of network activity; Device Identification and Driver Management (DIDM) provides end users the ability to discover, manage and automate a wide range of existing hardware in their infrastructure; Persistence ensures application-specific data is preserved over time or in the event of a catastrophe; and Topology Processing Framework allows for filtered and/or aggregated views of a network, including multi-protocol, underlay and overlay representations.
- New and enhanced APIs for interoperability. Network Intent Composition (NIC) enables the controller to manage and direct network services and resources based on describing the “intent” for network behaviors and network policies, while Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) provides abstractions and services for simplified network views and network services. These new policy/intent-based abstractions augment the existing GBP project that was introduced with the Helium release. Distributed Virtual Router (DVR)
- Six new protocols to support an ever-widening set of use cases. This includes Source Group Tag eXchange (SXP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IoT Data Management (IoTDM), SMNP Plugin, Open Policy Framework (OpFlex) and Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP).
“End users have already deployed OpenDaylight for a wide variety of use cases from NFV, network on demand, flow programming using OpenFlow and even Internet of Things,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight. “Lithium was built to meet the requirements of the wide range of end users embedding OpenDaylight into the heart of their products, services and infrastructures. I expect new and improved capabilities such as service chaining and network virtualization to be quickly picked up by our user base. We are really happy to see the interest the Telco/NFV community has shown in ODL.”
The OpenDaylight Project also noted that 466 people have contributed over 2.3 million lines of code.
The second annual OpenDaylight Summit is scheduled for July 27-31 in Santa Clara, California.
The OpenDaylight Project also introduced an Advisory Group of technology leaders from enterprise, telco and academic organizations: Pedro Aranda, Telefónica I+D; Margaret Chiosi, AT&T; Dr. Jamil Chawki, Orange; Chris Donley, CableLabs; Jay Etchings, Arizona State University; Chris Luke, Comcast; Harvey Newman, Caltech; Liang Ou, China Telecom; Dominick Paniscotti, Nasdaq; Ralf Trezeciak, Deutsche Telekom; Beau Williamson, T-Mobile; and Alex Zhang, China Mobile.
