Chinese giants give world another SDN and NFV platform

If you didn't think the world needed another Software Defined Networking (SDN) project, bad luck: you've got one anyway: it's called Open-O and hopes to put SDN and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) in the same yoke.

If that sounds familiar, it's because AT&T also wants to lead the open source world into a combination SDN/NFV – but its project with the Linux Foundation seems to be running late. AT&T's promise to release its ECOMP – Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy platform – came in July.

In fact, Open-O seems to be in much the same boat: it's announced its first release, but not yet published the code. It apparently involves seven discrete projects and OpenStack, but beyond that, it's still vapourware.

The China-driven project, under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, got its first public outing with Huawei demonstrating Open-O Sun, its combined SDN/NFV orchestrator, at the Operations Transformation Forum in Wuzhen, China.

Huawei says the project includes code from China Mobile and four other companies.

The YANG and Oasis' TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) data models are supported, and Open-O includes components from Canonical, Raisecom and Red Hat, Huawei says.

Open-O's members include China Mobile, China Telecom, Hong Kong Telecom (HKT), Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Intel, and ZTE. ®