SAN FRANCISCO - The OpenDaylight Project, the leading open source platform for programmable, software-defined networks, today announced its fifth open Software-Defined Networking (SDN) release, OpenDaylight Boron. With this release, OpenDaylight marks a new milestone in technology and community maturity. Boron is the result of major user-led contributions and engagement, with significant enhancements to Cloud/NFV support, as well as enhanced standardization, performance and tooling to ease management across a range of use cases.

“Since its inception in 2013, OpenDaylight has served to unite the industry around a common SDN platform,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight. "With Boron, the OpenDaylight platform cements its position as the de facto standard platform for building next-generation networking solutions. Boron further develops and standardizes support for the industry’s leading use cases, while facilitating development of innovative new approaches to solving network-related business challenges. From telcos to the Internet of Things, OpenDaylight is at the heart of more and more SDN solutions and production infrastructures.”

As one of the most-deployed open SDN platform in the world, OpenDaylight’s fifth release saw an unprecedented level of engagement from users directly within the development process. More than half of the new projects proposed came from user organizations, including:

Additionally, user organizations collaborated with a mix of solution providers and other industry groups on key projects such as Genius, the application composition pipeline project that supports service function chaining. ODL’s Atrium project brings together the ONF, Criterion Networks, WIPRO and a large enterprise end user looking to reduce remote worker WAN costs by tens of millions of dollars annually while delivering improved user experience.

As a crucial downstream consumer of ODL’s platform, the OPNFV project has driven a broad set of Telco requirements and new functionality in OpenDaylight. As Service Function Chaining has become a key required capability of NFV deployments, collaboration between ODL and OPNFV SFC-focused projects have led to a number of key improvements including Proof of Transit validating service chain packet-flow, enhancements to support FD.io Service Chain Identification and support for the latest OVS release.

“With the Boron release, we focused a lot of effort on enhancing core platform resilience and building the control plane capabilities, which is crucial as the project scales,” said Colin Dixon, OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee Chair and Distinguished Engineer at Brocade. “As the platform has matured and more OpenDaylight-based solutions are reaching production, we’ve been able to leverage not only feedback, but an increase in engagement from a growing number of end users. This in an important step as it accelerates our ability to meet the real-world functionality, robustness and interoperability needs of end users.”

Boron provides several enhancements to evolve OpenDaylight’s support for Cloud/NFV, which was identified as the most common use case in the Fall 2016 OpenDaylight User Survey. OpenStack-related capabilities have been rearchitected within a unified development framework for better scalability and performance, including clustering, High Availability (HA), and persistence. Southbound enhancements for VNFs include OpenFlow and NETCONF optimization, as well as hardware VTEP support, and DPDK enhancements.

The NetVirt project brings new focus to features and performance to OpenStack environments. These include improved coordination between OpenStack Neutron and the controller, as well as enhanced support for IPv6, Security Groups (via OpenFlow configuration), VLANs, SR-IOV and other important capabilities.

In addition, the Genius project, a community-wide effort, provides an app-agnostic framework for application composition. This supports the deployment of modular distributed applications as well as Service Function Chaining (SFC). First introduced as a “proof of concept” project in Beryllium, Genius is now application-agnostic and can be used to operate production cloud networks.

OpenDaylight