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The Linux Foundation Takes Over Juniper's SDN-Based OpenContrail, Now Called 'Tungsten Fabric'

• By David Ramel
• 04/02/2018

Juniper Networks' OpenContrail open source network virtualization platform based on software-defined networking (SDN) has officially moved under the umbrella of The Linux Foundation and is now called Tungsten Fabric.

Open sourced by Juniper in 2013, OpenContrail was described by the company as a scalable network virtualization control plane that provides both feature-rich SDN and strong security.

Its features include: routing and switching; network services; load balancing; security and policies; performance and scale; gateway services; rich analytics; service chaining; high availability and upgrades; and APIs and orchestrations.

The move to The Linux Foundation was announced last December and completed last week with a new Web site under its new moniker Tungsten Fabric.

"Completing this move is important in that it gives our community a standard set of governance and licensing practices that are shared by many other open source initiatives," Juniper's Randy Bias said in a blog post. He said Juniper hopes it will become a ubiquitous, cloud-grade network fabric not dependent upon any specific underlay infrastructure and working across all cloud platforms. He said the goal is to provide a single point of control, visibility and management for all networks and network security.

The Linux Foundation echoed that idea in a statement last week. "It provides a single point of control, observability and analytics for networking and security," the Foundation said. "It is integrated with many cloud technology stacks, including Kubernetes, Mesos, VMware and OpenStack. It supports private cloud, hybrid cloud and public cloud deployments such as AWS and GCE. Tungsten Fabric includes a high performance vRouter that connects container, VM and bare-metal applications, and a controller which orchestrates network overlays, switch fabrics and router gateways."

Juniper said it moved OpenContrail to the Foundation in order to promote growth of the project, quicken pioneering advancements in the space, spark more community adoption and ease secure migrations to multicloud environments.

"The platform boasts a vibrant developer and end-user community," the Foundation said. "It is deployed at massive global scale, across public and private IaaS, CaaS and PaaS environments ranging from hyperscale cloud providers and telecom operators to enterprises. Tungsten Fabric’s mission is to build a ubiquitous, easy-to-use, scalable, secure and cloud-grade SDN stack that provides a network fabric capable of connecting diverse environments. Contributors and community members include Aricent, AT&T, Bell, Cavium, CertusNet, CloudOps, CodiLime, Intel, Juniper Networks, Lenovo, Mellanox, Mirantis, Netronome, Orange, SDN Essentials, TechTrueUp and Yandex."

The name change will allow Juniper to retain the trademarks for its Juniper Contrail commercial product line, lessening confusion between it and the open source offering.