News

Oracle, Flextronics and Extreme Networks Join OpenDaylight Project

Project seeks to accelerate adoption of software-defined networking.

• By David Ramel
• 06/06/2014

Having recently celebrated its one-year anniversary, the open source software-defined networking (SDN) project OpenDaylight yesterday announced Oracle Corp., Flextronics and Extreme Networks Inc. have become its newest members.

OpenDaylight is a collaborative project sponsored by The Linux Foundation in order to accelerate SDN and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) adoption in the new age of advanced network virtualization, abstraction and programmability, part of the software-defined datacenter (SDDC) phenomenon. Project members are developing code and blueprints to promote a common, open SDN framework.

"At this early stage of SDN and NFV adoption, the industry acknowledges the benefits of establishing an open, reference framework for programmability and control through an open source SDN and NFV solution," the OpenDaylight project said. "Such a framework maintains the flexibility and choice to allow organizations to deploy SDN and NFV as they please, yet still mitigates many of the risks of adopting early stage technologies and integrating with existing infrastructure investments."

The project now lists 39 members and says 195 developers are working on the platform. The project will release regular editions of its software that includes components such as: a pluggable controller; northbound (programmatic) and southbound (implementation) interfaces; protocol plug-ins; and applications.

The project's Hydrogen release, unveiled in February, is available in Base, Virtualization and Service Provider editions.

Oracle, which recently announced its beta Solaris 11.2 OS as a "modern cloud platform" with built-in SDN support, yesterday announced it plans to integrate Solaris with OpenDaylight SDN. "The integration is intended to allow customers to improve service quality and take advantage of apps-to-disk SLAs through compatibility with a wide range of SDN devices, applications and services," Oracle said. "It will also allow them to use a common and open SDN platform with OpenStack to manage Oracle Solaris-based clouds."

The OpenDaylight Project is just one industry effort attempting to instill some order and standards in the exploding, hype-laden SDN movement, still young and shaking itself out. Another effort is the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which is about a year older than OpenDaylight and also counts Oracle and Extreme Networks among its 120-plus members.

"The main difference between our organizations is that ONF is a user-led organization developing fundamental architecture and building blocks, whereas the OpenDaylight Project is primarily a vendor-led organization focused exclusively on implementing one instantiation of SDN," the ONF explained last year. "For example, ONF has resisted pressure to standardize a northbound API, because we feel a software interface like this is best arrived at through continued market experimentation. Thus, we are studying and characterizing -- and possibly prototyping -- it and the variety of data models currently employed in the market, but not standardizing it.

"One aspect of the OpenDaylight Project is the development of a northbound API, and this is as it should be," the ONF continued. "Especially as an open source project, OpenDaylight will test and iterate on [its] northbound API with real code serving real applications and use cases. If it achieves widespread market adoption, that will validate its utility to users -- at least users of those applications and use cases."

The OpenDaylight Project said its second software release, named Helium, is due out this fall.