CA, Spirent Join OpenDaylight SDN, NFV Effort

Software maker CA Technologies is among four new members of the OpenDaylight Project, a vendor-led consortium that is developing an open platform for software-defined networking and network-functions virtualization.

The other vendors joining the group Feb. 10 are Spirent Communications, which creates test solutions for the IT and communications industries; IIX, which builds software-defined interconnection solutions for linking networks; and Megaport, whose Megaport Platform offers connectivity to more than 100 network and cloud services providers.

The new companies bring the number of member vendors to 49. In addition, more than 300 developers are working on the OpenDaylight efforts, according to Neela Jacques, executive director of the group.

“With more and more end users looking to use [OpenDaylight] in their real-world networks, we’re seeing a broader range of technologies and players getting involved,” Jacques said in a statement. “These new members bring key management, security, and testing capabilities to the ODL community.”

The OpenDaylight Project was kicked off in 2013 by Cisco Systems and IBM, among others, and is a project of the Linux Foundation. The vendors are looking to create an open, common platform for software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV), technologies designed to enable the creation of more agile, dynamic and programmable networks by taking the control plane and networking tasks off the underlying networking gear and putting them into software that can run atop less-expensive commodity hardware.

The OpenDaylight framework will give vendors a common foundation on which to build, and organizers hope it will accelerate the adoption of SDN and NFV. The consortium launched its first software release—called Hydrogen—a year ago, and followed it with Helium in September.

“As a result of the application economy and the explosion of mobile services, the demands on the networks of enterprises and services providers have increased exponentially,” John Smith, general manager of enterprise management at CA, said in a statement. SDN “is one of the key ways to evolve the network to be more dynamic and responsive to the constantly changing needs of today’s organizations.”