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Networking Group Completing Software-Defined Puzzle
The Open Networking User Group (ONUG), on a mission to foster an enterprise and industry transition to new-age, open networking, furthered that effort by launching new initiatives to fill in the missing pieces of the software-defined infrastructure puzzle.
Officially, the industry consortium's mission "is to enable greater choice and options for IT business leaders by advocating for open interoperable hardware and software-defined infrastructure solutions that span across the entire IT stack, all in an effort to create business value."
To do that, it has created use case working groups to address different aspects of the movement, such as virtual networks/overlays, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), traffic monitoring/visibility and many more.
The ONUG yesterday launched four new initiatives to develop open technologies that it said are missing from its envisioned common networking ecosystem but are necessary to scale up the open software-defined infrastructure market. Those include: Open SD-WAN Exchange (OSE); Open Interoperable Control Plane (OICP); Open Traffic Management Format (OTMF); and Open Network State Format (ONSF).
The OSE "is an open framework to allow for one vendor SD-WAN solution to directly talk to another vendor SD-WAN solution without reliance on underlying infrastructure and/or protocols," the ONUG said.
The OICP "is an open framework to deliver an interoperable control plane standard that can be used and understood by all vendors so that an overlay with vendor A, can integrate with an overlay with vendor B, etc.," the group said.
[Click on image for larger view.] Part of an Infographic Showing ONUG Priorities (source: ONUG).
The OTMF "addresses the huge management gap between overlay and underlay, network monitoring and visibility," it said.
Finally, the ONSF "provides a common format in which state information from multiple physical and virtual entities is collected and stored so that analytics can be applied. ONSF leverages existing open published APIs being made available in network devices and software."
Further work is planned to help industry players such as academics, IT execs and vendors define the issues more completely. That work will be conducted at four workshops to be held in New York later this year. Furthermore, the ONUG said it would provide guidance, public and private events such as plugfests and hackathons, and demonstrations at ONUG conferences to help in the effort. Companies signing on early to help out include: Apstra, Cisco, Citrix, CloudGenix, FatPipe, Glue Networks, NetScout, NTT Innovation Institute, Inc., Nuage Networks, Silver Peak, VeloCloud, Veriflow, Verizon, Versa Networks and Viptela.
"The new open industry initiatives will promote collaboration amongst vendors, academics, standards and open source organizations, and enterprise IT business leaders that is vital in bringing the ONUG Community closer to the open software-defined infrastructure they require," said Nick Lippis, co-chairman and co-founder of ONUG. "I would like to commend these trailblazing participants for the role they are playing in steering this movement, which will ultimately work to benefit both IT buyers and sellers."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.