SAN FRANCISCO – The Open Network Automation Project (ONAP) is finalizing launch plans for its third platform update that will include a focus on out-of-the-box deployment, security, scalability, and performance. That platform – dubbed Casablanca – is set to be unveiled in November.
Catherine Lefèvre, associate vice president for network cloud and infrastructure at AT&T Labs, said those updates are targeted at improving commercial use of the platform. And with the latest release, she said the community has become more involved in the process.
Lefèvre noted that the initial ONAP Amsterdam release, which was unveiled last November, had 26 sub-projects with AT&T leading 14 of those. The more recent Beijing release, which was launched in June, was broader with 30 sub-projects, but AT&T still contributed a majority of the work.
With Casablanca, Lefèvre showed a graph that indicated a more equitable workload amongst AT&T, the other founding carrier members, and more recent additions.
ONAP was initially birthed out of the combination of AT&T’s ECOMP and China Mobile’s Open-O network orchestration efforts. Those were placed inside of the Linux Foundation under the ONAP banner. Lefèvre said that the community now includes more than 100 organizations.
ONAP was developed to allow carriers to automate, design, orchestrate, and manage services and virtual functions. It has gained significant traction with many of the world’s largest mobile operators, including three of the four largest in the U.S. This includes the somewhat unusual pairing of bitter rivals AT&T and Verizon both working on an open source project together.
Vendor Participation
ONAP is also beginning to make some headway in unconventional parts of the telecom ecosystem.
ADVA Optical Networking was recently part of a trial conducted by MEF that used separate versions of ONAP and the ONOS SDN controller to control network components. The ONAP orchestration showed how ADVA’s NFVI platform can work with a separate orchestrator.
However, despite the trial, Prayson Pate, CTO for ADVA’s Ensemble division, said the company was not directly participating in ONAP.
“We are evaluating the solution for interoperability and customer deployment scenarios,” said Pate. He did add that ADVA had customers that were committed to ONAP, and that the company would “need to ensure our products evolve with their deployment plans.”
Amdocs tapped into it’s work with ONAP to score a collaboration with Microsoft. That collaboration had Amdocs implementing ONAP on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. This allows service providers to deliver virtual network services running on Azure, orchestrated and managed using ONAP.