The OpenDaylight Project this week launched the fourth release of its network virtualization platform that group officials say addresses the growing demand from users who are deploying the technology for more enterprise-ready capabilities.
Developers enhanced the performance and scalability in Beryllium at a time they said users of the platform are moving from the testing stage to deployment, and as it is being embraced by a broad array of users, from service providers to enterprises to educational institutions, in regions around the world.
“OpenDaylight transcends individual use cases and geographic regions,” Colin Dixon, chairman of OpenDaylight’s Technical Steering Committee, wrote in a post on the project’s blog. “It’s not just for data centers, just for service providers, just for enterprises, just for academics, just for North America, or just for Europe. … Beryllium has been about living up to these realities with a significant focus on production-ready features including enhanced scale, stability, reliability and performance, but also delivering new functionality and tooling targeting our diversifying community.”
OpenDaylight is one of a number of industry consortiums working to develop open-source technologies for software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV), technologies that are rapidly changing the networking industry. Other groups include the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Open Networking Operating System (ONOS), a project launched by ON.Lab and Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV).
The goal of the groups is to use the benefits of open source to rapidly build out the foundational elements for SDN and NFV that vendors can then build their own products on top of. Among the OpenDaylight membership are Cisco Systems, Dell, Intel, Ericsson and IBM.
The disparate efforts have begun to work more closely together, such as the ONF adding support for OpenDaylight’s SDN controller and ONOS’ controller in releases of its Atrium software distribution. OpenDaylight Executive Director Neela Jacques said the enhancements in the Beryllium release continue the effort to reduce fragmentation among the open-source efforts.
“ODL Be [OpenDaylight Beryllium] delivers important performance and scalability improvements and adds significant new network services and abstractions to serve the ever-growing set of use cases being tackled by end-users,” Jacques said in a statement. “ODL Be brings us one step closer to unifying the industry around a single, common platform.”
Beryllium includes a range of performance and scalability improvements, including stronger analysis and testing of clustering, where multiple instances of OpenDaylight act as a single controller, according to project officials. In addition, with Beryllium, the OpenDaylight platform provides full support for OpenStack high availability and clustering through improved support for the APIs and features in the OpenStack Neutron networking technology.
In addition, engineers updated Beryllium’s microservices architecture and added new projects like NetIDE for intent-based network modeling. OpenDaylight’s NeXt UI feature offers visual displays to make it easier for users to better understand the platform’s functionality, and updated documentation is available to help users with installation and deployment.
Beryllium also offers a broad range of configurations for policy and intent, including NEMO, Application Layer Traffic Optimization, Group Based Policy and Network Intent Composition, offering wide flexibility for intent-based management and director of network services. It also brings a wide array of SDN use cases for enterprises and service providers, officials said.
Such new capabilities are important, OpenDaylight’s Dixon wrote.
“The months since the Lithium release have been significant ones for OpenDaylight,” he wrote. “They’ve marked a shift in the interest in OpenDaylight from early adopters, proofs of concept, and kicking the tires to major production deployments, significant end-user adoption, and the development of a vibrant user community. People are actively using OpenDaylight to provide automated service delivery for customers, optimize the network resource utilization of their applications, scale and automate their cloud and NFV deployments, deliver regional networks for smart cities and IoT [Internet of things], as well as simply providing better visibility and control of the networks they already have.”