Although open source groups doing network functions virtualization (NFV) management and network orchestration (MANO) have proliferated, 26 percent of end-user respondents to an SDxCentral survey said they will not consider open-source MANO. Rather, they will “only use commercial solutions,” according to survey results in the “2017 NFV Report Series Part 2: Orchestrating NFV – MANO and Service Assurance.”
However, 49 percent of end-user respondents said they will consider open-source MANO solutions “once they are more mature.”
The results come from a survey SDxCentral’s research team conducted in March 2017 to understand the state of NFV and MANO.
Of those who were considering open-source MANO at the time of the survey, 19 percent were looking at software from Open Source MANO (OSM), 13 percent were considering Open-O’s software, 12 percent were looking at Tacker, and 9 percent were eyeing other open source offerings. However, since the survey was conducted, Open-O has merged with AT&T’s ECOMP platform to form ONAP.
The creation of ONAP is indicative of an NFV MANO landscape that continues to evolve rapidly. SDxCentral’s researchers speculate that eventually OSM might merge with ONAP to form a single open-source MANO initiative. “SDxCentral’s view is that a three-way tie-up is unlikely to happen in 2017,” according to the report. “At the same time, we have heard from carriers worldwide that they would prefer to have a single solution that combines all the efforts under one roof.”
However, there are other MANO-related projects in addition to ONAP and OSM, including:
- Tacker — A spin-off from OpenStack’s Neutron project, working on a VNF manager and a NFV orchestrator.
- OpenBaton — A MANO project led by two research organizations based out of Germany: the Fraunhofer Fokus Institute and the Technical University of Berlin.
- Cloudify Telecom Edition — Built to provide the full suite of NFV MANO, serving as the NFV orchestrator and generic VNF manager.
- Gohan — An open source service development engine for software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV orchestration created and maintained by NTT Data.
- Tata Telco Cloud—A Tata Consultancy Services open source initiative that provides an open VNF manager to enable NFV service orchestration on the OpenStack platform.