On the eve of next week’s ONS North America event, The Linux Foundation and the Open Compute Project (OCP) launched a collaborative effort to drive the development of open source networking based on software and hardware solutions.
Under the terms of the agreement, the two organizations will create stronger integration and testing, new open networking features, more scalability, a reduction in CAPEX/OPEX, greater harmonization with switch network operating systems and increased interoperability for NFV network transitions.
As the telecom and IT industries have virtualized more network functions, which has resulted in the disaggregation of hardware and software, the interest in open source at both layers has continued to rise.
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Each of these organizations bring something to the table.
OCP provides an open source option for the hardware layer, and The Linux Foundation’s OPNFV project integrates OCP along with other open source software projects into relevant NFV reference architectures. Due to this alignment, OCP and OPNFV already have been collaborating on activities such as plugfests and joint demos.
This collaboration with OCP comes at a time when the The Linux Foundation is bringing commonality across its myriad network efforts. The first step in this direction was the creation of the LF Networking Fund (LFN). By creating a combined administrative structure, Linux Foundation said LFN will provide a platform for cross-project collaboration.
Already, nine of the top 10 open source networking projects have agreed to participate in LFN. The six founding projects of LFN are FD.io, OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV, PDNA and SNAS.