SAN FRANCISCO -- The OpenDaylight Project, a community-led and industry-supported open source platform to advance Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), announced that its second open source software release, Helium, is available for download.

In the past year the networking industry has come to embrace open source as the right path toward achieving innovation and interoperability for software-defined networks. OpenDaylight’s open SDN and NFV platform has evolved to include 11 new protocols, applications and technologies making it the most flexible and interoperable platform available. Over a dozen vendors are building their controllers on top of OpenDaylight, and users are seeing the value of a common SDN platform and beginning to turn to OpenDaylight for testing.

OpenDaylight Helium is aimed at developers and users who want to start testing and managing SDN in production environments. The community’s second release comes with a new user interface and a much simpler and customizable installation process. The components within OpenDaylight are now available as a collection of features that users can hand-select thanks to the use of the Apache Karaf container. There is deeper integration with OpenStack for those who want to manage their networks using OpenDaylight including significant improvements in the Open vSwitch Database (OVSDB) project, and a technology preview of advanced OpenStack features such as Security Groups, Distributed Virtual Router and Load Balancing-as-a-Service. The OpenDaylight platform has evolved in other key areas including high availability, clustering and security, as well as strengthening and adding new protocols like OpenFlow Table Type Patterns, PacketCable MultiMedia, an application policy framework and tools for Service Function Chaining.

“The OpenDaylight community is iterating, shaping and defining a de facto standard for SDN and NFV through code creation,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight. “They’ve taken on the monumental task of bringing together all the disparate technologies, thoughts and and ideas around SDN and forming it into a cohesive platform. They’ve made amazing progress in a short amount of time as you can see in this second release which integrates more functionality, apps and use cases. I highly encourage you to see for yourself the progress being made and come take part.”

OpenDaylight