News

Group Seeks To Patch Software-Defined Holes

• By David Ramel
• 05/11/2016

The Open Networking User Group (ONUG) has launched new initiatives to fill in the missing pieces of the software-defined infrastructure puzzle.

The ONUG is an industry consortium that advocates for a common networking ecosystem featuring open and interoperable hardware and software-defined infrastructure solutions.

It has developed use case working groups to address parts of that puzzle, such as virtual networks/overlays, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), traffic monitoring/visibility and many more.

Yesterday, it launched four new initiatives to develop open technologies that it said are missing from the ecosystem but are necessary to scale up the open software-defined infrastructure market. They are: Open SD-WAN Exchange (OSE); Open Interoperable Control Plane (OICP); Open Traffic Management Format (OTMF); and Open Network State Format (ONSF).

The OSE "is an open framework to allow for one vendor SD-WAN solution to directly talk to another vendor SD-WAN solution without reliance on underlying infrastructure and/or protocols," the ONUG said.

The OICP "is an open framework to deliver an interoperable control plane standard that can be used and understood by all vendors so that an overlay with vendor A, can integrate with an overlay with vendor B, etc.," the group said.

The OTMF "addresses the huge management gap between overlay and underlay, network monitoring and visibility," it said.

Finally, the ONSF "provides a common format in which state information from multiple physical and virtual entities is collected and stored so that analytics can be applied. ONSF leverages existing open published APIs being made available in network devices and software."

Further work is planned to help industry players such as academics, IT execs and vendors define the issues more completely. That work will be conducted at four workshops to be held in New York later this year. Furthermore, the ONUG said it would provide guidance, public and private events such as plugfests and hackathons, and demonstrations at ONUG conferences to help in the effort. Companies signing on early to help out include: Apstra, Cisco, Citrix, CloudGenix, FatPipe, Glue Networks, NetScout, NTT Innovation Institute Inc., Nuage Networks, Silver Peak, VeloCloud, Veriflow, Verizon, Versa Networks and Viptela.

"The new open industry initiatives will promote collaboration amongst vendors, academics, standards and open source organizations, and enterprise IT business leaders that is vital in bringing the ONUG Community closer to the open software-defined infrastructure they require," said Nick Lippis, co-chairman and co-founder of ONUG. "I would like to commend these trailblazing participants for the role they are playing in steering this movement, which will ultimately work to benefit both IT buyers and sellers."