Why OPNFV? Prodip Sen, CTO for Network Functions Virtualization at HP and Reino Tammela, Head of Nokia’s Technology Center in Espoo, discuss the reasons for a new industry initiative outside of ETSI’s ISG for NFV.
The new project aims to accelerate deployments. The jump-start does not aim to replace on-going standards development but to take a pragmatic approach to market demands.
At the end of September, The Linux Foundation launched the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV) with the goal of accelerating the commercial introduction of NFV products and services.
OPNFV will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components. Because multiple open source NFV building blocks already exist, OPNFV will work with upstream projects to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.
The initial project objectives are to:
- develop an integrated and tested open source platform that can be used to investigate and demonstrate core NFV functionality;
- include proactive participation of leading end users to validate that OPNFV meets the needs of the end user community;
- contribute to and participate in relevant open source projects that will be leveraged in the OPNFV reference platform;
- establish an open ecosystem for NFV solutions based on open standards and open source software; and
- promote OPNFV as the preferred open reference platform.
While not developing standards, OPNFV will work closely with ETSI’s NFV ISG, among others, to drive consistent implementation of standards for an open NFV reference platform. When open source software development is aligned with standards development, it can root out issues early, identify resolutions and become the de facto codebase, resulting in a far more economical approach to platform development.
OPNFV will license new components under the Apache License Version 2.0 and will work within the licensing requirements of upstream projects in order to contribute code back to these projects. A Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee (TSC) will govern the initiative. The Board will be made up of representatives from member companies and will set the business direction and scope of the project. The TSC will also provide technical governance and leadership for the project.
Board officers for OPNFV include:
- Prodip Sen, board chair (HP)
- Margaret Chiosi, president (AT&T)
- Wenjing Chu, secretary (Dell)
- Hui Deng, treasurer (China Mobile)
Platinum founding members of IPNFV include AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DOCOMO, Red Hat, Telecom Italia and Vodafone. Silver-level founding members include 6WIND, Alcatel-Lucent, ARM, Broadcom, CableLabs, Cavium, CenturyLink, Ciena, Citrix, ClearPath Networks, ConteXtream, Coriant, Cyan, Dorado Software, Ixia, Metaswitch Networks, Mirantis, Orange, Sandvine, Sprint and Wind River.
A 21-page whitepaper on OPNFV is here:
https://www.opnfv.org//sites/opnfv/files/pages/files/opnfv_whitepaper_092914.pdf
