The industry-supported open source OpenDaylight project took the wraps off the first release of “Hydrogen” today, its software defined networking architecture billed to accelerate the adoption of SDN among enterprise IT and network providers.
“The OpenDaylight community is developing an SDN architecture that supports a wide range of protocols and can rapidly evolve in the direction SDN goes, not based on any one vendor’s purposes,” said David Meyer, Technical Steering Committee chair of the OpenDaylight Project.
“As an open source project OpenDaylight can be a core component within any SDN architecture, putting the user in control. The community is working to further refine the Service Abstraction Layer to deliver an efficient application API that can be used over a broad collection of network devices so we can deliver a best-of-breed platform that will help users of all stripes realize the promise of SDN,” he added.
The community-led project, which is overseen by the Linux Foundation, is adding both new and legacy protocols such as OVSDB, OpenFlow 1.3.0, BGP and PCEP in a bid to support as wide a range of use cases as possible, and it will also include a number of means to enable and control network virtualisation. The Project’s members have also added OpenStack support via a plugin for OpenStack Neutron – Open Stack’s cloud networking controller formerly known as Quantum, and with Open vSwitch Database support users will be able to manage the architecture through Open Stack.
“OpenDaylight has made great strides toward its goal of accelerating a common SDN platform. As the networking industry evolves to a software-defined world we are seeing open source development and design methodology as the driving force for modern architectures,” said Inder Gopal, board of directors chair, OpenDaylight Project.
As SDN swiftly moves into the sphere of practical deployment it’s clear that software defined networking and cloud share one obvious attribute – that open source development of these technologies is harnessing a level of innovation that, one could argue, is outpacing proprietary development.
That being said, top contributors to the OpenDaylight Project include a number of notables like Brocade, Cisco, Ericsson, and Juniper Networks, all of whom run the risk of disruption from what effectively amounts to (with a few exceptions) the commoditisation of their hardware-based networking products.
Founded in February this year, OpenDaylight is still in its infancy and not as far along – or as broadly mandated – as the Open Network Foundation. But it will be interesting to see how these networking vendors move forward once the architecture makes its public debut.
OpenDaylight Hydrogen will be previewed at OpenDaylight developer events over the next month as the architecture undergoes more fine tuning before its public release.
[“Source- businesscloudnews”]
