News

New ONOS Software-Defined Networking OS Released

• By David Ramel
• 06/17/2016

"Goldeneye" is the name of the seventh and latest release of the open source software-defined networking (SDN) operating system championed by the ONOS Project.

Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the ONOS Project provides the software "designed by service providers for service providers" engineered for scalability, high availability (HA), strong performance and appropriate SDN abstractions.

"Today's service providers face the dual challenge of building out the datacenter and network infrastructure required by glut of mobile data, without the agility or cost model needed to support the demand," ONOS said in a news release this week. "SDN and NFV [network functions virtualization] solutions are emerging to address this pain point, enabling service providers to take control of their infrastructure, advance cloud and Internet innovations and reduce capital and operational costs."

Among many new features, ONOS listed the following technical contributions to Goldeneye:

• R&E Deployments announced ONOS integration into an international, industrial and federated testbed.
• Testing infrastructure, which is conceptually similar to 'Chaos Monkey', was added to drive higher levels of reliability testing.
• Build Environment moved to use Buck, enabling 10 times the performance of builds and improving the overall development experience.
• Applications' Performance of Adaptive Flow Monitoring & Selective DPI for ONOS from ETRI has been improved, providing lower overhead flow monitoring in addition to Yang toolchain support from Huawei, which provides improved integration with legacy devices.
• Northbound Intent subsystem is now integrated with the Flow objectives subsystem.
• Core performance improved six times for strongly consistent distributed operations, continuing the project's focus on highly performant distributed operations.
• Southbound improvements to Cisco IOS NETCONF and YANG toolchain.

"Thanks to the broad range of service providers, industry leaders and developers actively contributing to and developing ONOS, the project is promoting network disruption through open source software and whitebox switches, while providing incremental SDN delivery to support migration and evolve carrier networks," said exec Bill Snow at ON.Lab, which provides a core engineering team for the project. "ONOS is the only SDN control plane that can support both disruptive and incremental SDN for service providers."

Following a quarterly release cycle, Goldeneye follows Falcon, released in March.