OpenDaylight Ships Third Open SDN Release, 'Lithium'

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 OpenDaylight Lithium, its third open SDN software release, is now available to those seeking to build and deploy SDN solutions.

“Our second release Helium was deployed in a wide variety of use cases--from people looking to better manage and orchestrate their existing networks to Internet of Things and smart cities, to those who are managing clouds and deploying or testing NFV,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight. “With Lithium, OpenDaylight meets the needs of people going into production and we’ll be expanding on these use cases at the OpenDaylight Summit this July.”

“We’re seeing more participation in our community from many service providers, as well as the global research community and early adopter enterprises,” said Colin Dixon, Technical Steering Committee Chair, OpenDaylight.

OpenDaylight is a highly available, modular, extensible, scalable and multi-protocol controller infrastructure built for SDN deployments on modern heterogeneous multi-vendor networks. OpenDaylight provides a model-driven service abstraction platform that allows users to write apps that easily work across a wide variety of hardware and protocols. With Lithium, service providers and enterprises can transition to SDN with particular focus on broadening programmability of intelligent networks. They can compose their own service architectures or leverage an OpenDaylight-based commercial offering to to deliver dynamic network services in a cloud environment, craft dynamic intent-based policies and begin virtualizing functions with Service Function Chaining (SFC).

Lithium has been designed to meet the needs of end users including those who are leveraging Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV). OpenDaylight Lithium improvements include:

Increased scalability and performance. OpenDaylight’s Integration Group spent significant time testing against end user-defined use cases and requirements to boost scalability and performance of core architectural components in Lithium.

Network services for cloud data center platforms. Native support for the OpenStack Neutron framework combined with features such as SFC, Virtual Tenant Networking (VTN) and Group-Based Policy (GBP) allow users to easily design device, user and group-level policies including customized service chains for firewall, load balancing and other application network services.

New features for security and automation. Unified Secure Channel eases secure communication between OpenDaylight and widely distributed networking equipment; Time Series Data Repository (TSDR) enables collection and analysis of large amounts of network activity; Device Identification and Driver Management (DIDM) is a framework to allow non-OpenFlow devices to benefit from OpenDaylight’s automation capabilities; Persistence ensures application-specific data is preserved over time or in the event of a catastrophe; and Topology Processing Framework allowing for filtered and/or aggregated views of a network, including multi-protocol, underlay and overlay representations.

New and enhanced APIs for interoperability. Network Intent Composition (NIC) enables the controller to manage and direct network services and resources based on describing the “intent” for network behaviors and network policies, while Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) provides abstractions and services for simplified network views and network services. These new policy/intent-based abstractions augment the existing GBP project that was introduced with the Helium release. Interoperability with OpenStack Neutron has been improved and now supports better feature parity with Neutron including native Distributed Virtual Router (DVR) services for more seamless cloud orchestration as well as a more robust solution.

Six new protocols to support an ever-widening set of use cases. This includes Source Group Tag eXchange (SXP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IoT Data Management (IoTDM), SMNP Plugin, Open Policy Framework (OpFlex) and Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP).

In a separate release:

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), today announced that enterprise, telco and academic users have joined the (AG) to provide technical input to the OpenDaylight developer community. Foundational members include Pedro Aranda, Telefónica I+D; Margaret Chiosi, AT&T; Dr. Jamil Chawki, Orange; Chris Donley, CableLabs; Jay Etchings, Arizona State University; Chris Luke, Comcast; Harvey Newman, Caltech; Liang Ou, China Telecom; Dominick Paniscotti, Nasdaq; Ralf Trezeciak, Deutsche Telekom; Beau Williamson, T-Mobile; and Alex Zhang, China Mobile.

OpenDaylight AG was created to provide a forum where end users could assist and support the project in its objectives by providing technical and strategic guidance to the OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and developer community based on their experience in running many of the world’s most demanding networks. Members meet monthly to share details about their current and future network architectures, key requirements and challenges for SDN and NFV and top use cases--some of which are detailed on the OpenDaylight blog. This promotes understanding by the TSC of how ODL is and will be used in networks of various size and scale. Delegates serve a two-year term that is renewable on an annual basis.

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