ON.Lab Launches Revolutionary SDN Open Source Network Operating System — ONOS — on behalf of its Community of Service Providers and Innovator Partners

The Open Networking Lab, ON.Lab, today launched the revolutionary open source SDN Open Network Operating System (ONOS) on behalf of the ONOS community of partners, contributors and end-users. The open source software will be released and available for download on Dec. 5 (see event details below). ONOS is a complete open source SDN network operating system that enables agile service creation and deployment at scale on any hardware, including white boxes. This disruptive platform delivers a highly available, scalable SDN control plane featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control, and service applications across mission critical networks.

Initially targeted to service providers, the community’s goal is to extend the platform for cloud service providers, enterprises and mainstream deployments. Founding members who are funding and contributing to the ONOS initiative include AT&T, NTT Communications, Ciena, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, NEC; and members who are collaborating and contributing to ONOS include Infoblox, SRI, Internet2, CNIT and Create-Net. Partners are looking forward to ONOS’ availability and embracing its initial uses. The availability of ONOS as an open source software will be a strong driver for the growth of its ecosystem and its continued successful evolution.

“By now, SDN is deployed in data centers worldwide, based on proprietary software,” said Scott Shenker, professor of CS at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Open Network Research Center. “The next frontier for SDN is service provider networks, where large network operators need to program their networks to create new, differentiated services. To enable this, we need a highly available, scalable control plane such as ONOS upon which new services can be instantiated and deployed.”

Since inception, ONOS has had the support and contributions of service providers. Targeted to mission critical networks, ONOS empowers providers to realize the true benefits of SDN by enabling the creation of optimized, agile and responsive network infrastructure. ONOS’ architecture delivers the network programmability, scalability, high availability and performance required to meet the needs of carrier-grade network environments. Tier 1 service provider partners such as AT&T and NTT Communications and several key vendors have supported the ONOS platform from its inception and continue to work with the community to deliver significant new use cases.

“Software-defined networking can radically reshape the wide area network,” said John Donovan, senior executive vice president, AT&T Technology & Operations. “The introduction of ONOS provides another open source SDN option designed for service provider networks with the potential to deliver the performance, scale, availability and core features that we value.”

ONOS is architected for ease of use in mission critical networks, providing a pure SDN approach to networking that is embraced by the open source community. By capitalizing on white box switches to reduce costs and managing them with SDN, service providers have the ability to allocate higher budgets to applications and business services while reducing spending on operations and maintenance.

“ONOS is built from scratch, from the ground-up, to be highly available, fast and extensible. It can be used to control existing equipment or new white boxes, allowing service providers to gain more control of their networks and reduce costs,” said Nick McKeown, professor of CS and EE at Stanford and faculty director of the Open Network Research Center.

ONOS also allows providers to gradually migrate their existing networks to SDN without requiring instant forklift upgrades by supporting a diversity of southbound devices and interfaces in addition to OpenFlow. With the potential to transform and reshape the networking environment, open source SDN delivers increased service innovation through a variety of applications developed and contributed by the open source community.

“NTT Communications and ON.Lab are well aligned in our goals for developing SDN for service provider networks,” said Yukio Ito, senior vice president and board member at NTT Communications. “We have been at the forefront of deploying SDN in carrier networks. We recognize the need for an open source network OS that provides carrier grade features to deliver carrier grade services. With ONOS’ northbound abstractions we now have an opportunity to develop control, management, and configuration applications quickly. We are excited to pilot use cases on ONOS in 2015.”

“ONOS is created with the idea of bringing a solid open source SDN platform to meet the needs of service providers and enterprises,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director of ON.Lab. “We have achieved our objective of bringing, for the first time, a complete open source SDN OS that not only addresses the mission critical needs of service providers and enterprises but also delivers capabilities that enable developer and DevOps communities to create, operate and innovate on legacy networks and white boxes. ON.Lab is committed to driving the ONOS project based on open source best practices and bringing innovation and true SDN value to the community.”