ONF Gets Close to the Edge

The Open Networking Foundation is making good on promises made in its spring reorganization, announcing four new reference designs for virtualizing the network's edge and four new supply chain partners as well. (See ONF Announces New Reference Designs and ONF Operators Take Charge of Edge SDN.)

The announcements come less than three months after a major strategic shift put operators in charge of open source efforts to build a distributed cloud at the edge of the network with the intent of developing a common approach that would both speed deployment and build up a supply chain of vendor partners. Four such companies have stepped up -- Adtran Inc. (Nasdaq: ADTN), Dell EMC , Edgecore Networks, and Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) -- committing $500,000 to the project as well as two full-time people over the next five years, which is the top tier of membership in the Open Networking Foundation .

Early drafts of the four reference designs will be available in July. They include software-defined (SDN) broadband access supporting multiple access technologies at the edge; a network functions virtualization (NFV) data center fabric optimized for the edge; a next-gen SDN reference leveraging P4 technology for flexible data plane programmability and VNF acceleration; and a multivendor open disaggregated transport network (OTDN).

"Operators have been hard at work over the last few months, we have new operator groups that have formed and a new technology leadership team and they have been meeting frequently," says Timon Sloane, vice-president of marketing and ecosystem. "We believe we are delivering on all fronts on this and making significant progress."

The common reference designs then become the blueprints for the vendor community, to make it easier for them to engage in the open source process. Even with the latest additions, however, that remains a rather exclusive club. Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN) Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), Radisys Corp. (Nasdaq: RSYS) and Samsung Corp. were already on board but as Sloane noted at the Big Communications Event in May, many larger vendors who have partnered with ONF in the past have not yet stepped up. (See ONF: Major Vendors Not Joining Open Edge.)

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading

This is an edited version of a story that was originally published on Telco Transformation's sister site, Light Reading. To see the full story, click here.