NFV Open-Source Group Schedules First Conference

The Open Platform for NFV Project, an industry consortium launched in September 2014 to accelerate the adoption of network-functions virtualization, will sponsor its first conference later this year.

The OPNFV Summit, which will be hosted by the Linux Foundation, will run Nov. 11-12 in Burlingame, Calif. The group announced a call for speaking proposals Feb. 24, with a deadline of June 26.

The goal of the summit is to bring together networking industry players, service providers and open-source professionals to push forward the idea of an open-source platform for NFV, which along with software-defined networking (SDN) is promising to reshape the networking space. SDN and NFV call for putting the network control plane and networking tasks such as intrusion detection and load balancing into software.

OPNFV, which was founded by Intel, IBM and Cisco Systems, is one of several open-source efforts—such as the OpenDaylight Project and the Open Interconnect Consortium—aimed at creating a common platform for SDN and NFV.

“The OPNFV project is unique as it aims to build a carrier-grade NFV platform by integrating and testing existing open-source software components and contributing back into upstream communities based on NFV requirements,” Heather Kirksey, who earlier this month was named director of the OPNFV, said in a statement. “The summit will offer plenty of opportunities for collaboration between open-source communities and industry experts, to work with the code and the developers who are solving the real-world problems.”

Group members in December announced that the organization’s technical steering committee was reviewing a range of project ideas to determine which would be pursued by the panel. At the same time, the broader OPNFV community was focusing on establishing an integration and baseline platform along with creating other NFV-related projects that will become part of the OPNFV’s second release of 2015.

Some of the topics that will be discussed at the summit include offering OPNFV use cases, working with code and building an OPNFV community. In addition, there also will be a Hackfest Nov. 9-10 to give developers and members of the OPNFV community the chance to contribute to projects and the group’s code base.