The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project has doubled its members since launching six months ago, with Comcast and Samsung among the latest group signing on.
ONAP has doubled its roster to more than 900 contributors, 50 members, and 30 projects. Also joining in the latest group are Fujitsu, Infosys, and Netcracker Technology, according to a Monday announcement.
The ONAP community is now working to deliver a neutral automation platform form network, infrastructure, and services across service providers, cloud providers, and enterprises in a virtualized environment. The group says the decisions by these major companies to join the initiative reflects a push among providers and vendors to automate their networks with SDN and NFV.
“We’re excited to add new geographic and industry perspectives to ONAP and incredibly impressed with the progress the technical community is making with the first release,” Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking at the Linux Foundation, comments. “Our growth in the last few months alone proves telecommunications, cable/cloud operators, and solution providers believe there is a clear need for a common platform for rapidly designing, implementing, and managing differentiated services with meaningful cost savings.”
ONAP members have come together to develop a number of projects and technologies key to virtual network functions (VNF) orchestration that combine essential features from both OPEN-O and ECOMP platforms. This includes a suite of tools and guidelines created to aid vendors in creating, integrating, and validating their VNFs with ONAP.
Progress is moving rapidly for the first release, Amsterdam, which is expected to be unveiled later this year. ONAP says Amsterdam will be the first release to integrate the original OPEN-O and ECOMP code bases into a common orchestration platform. The technical community met this week to ensure Amsterdam continues to move forward, and plans to meet again outside of Paris at the end of September.
ONAP also announced the acceptance of ICE. ICE is an incubation and validation platform developed at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, Calif. It was recently made part of ONAP by the TSC.
The platform, now known as the VNF Validation Program (ICE) Project, includes a defined validation process and scripts that will form the basis of certification and self-test programs for ONAP, the group says. The project, together with the VNF Requirements Project and the VNF SDK Project, will define how VNFs can obtain an ONAP Compatible Label.
ONAP says that other key areas of integration include service orchestration, deployment, and monitoring of VNFs along with closed loop automation.
The TSC has also approved several uses cases required for carrier networks of the future, including Residential Broadband vCPE, vFW/vDNS, and VoLTE.
