ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt announces ONF’s collaboration with ETSI and release of the OpenFlow-enabled SDN and NFV solution brief.
It may seem like we’ve just talked about the importance of being open when it comes to Software Defined Networking (SDN). Well, we did, and we plan to continue talking about it in the weeks and months to come. Why? Today’s news is a good example: the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced an agreement to further the development of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) standards with the help of SDN. This is exciting news as both organizations have a shared commitment to supporting the needs of network operators seeking to benefit from advances in open networking, which aligns with ONF’s mission to promote the further commercialization and availability of open SDN products. The formal agreement was signed today at the ETSI General Assembly meeting in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, France.
Many of you may know that ETSI is an independent standards organization that has been instrumental in developing standards for information and communications technologies (ICT) within Europe. It was created in 1988 as a nonprofit by the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT), which has been the coordinating body for European telecommunications and postal organizations since 1959. Like ONF, ETSI is a not-for-profit organization. ETSI has more than 700 member organizations representing more than 62 countries around the world.
As noted in the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) white paper on NFV, this collaboration builds on what ONF has established with SDN and the OpenFlow® protocol, as SDN architecture is supportive of NFV as the SDN architecture empowers, enables, and provides the technical infrastructure for NFV. Together the organizations will explore the application of SDN configuration and control protocols as the base for the network infrastructure supporting NFV, and conversely the possibilities that NFV opens for virtualizing the forwarding plane functions. In particular, our two organizations will collaborate on the means to build dynamic, programmable Virtualized Network Function (VNF) forwarding graphs, ways to provide persistent secure connections among VNFs, and the application of SDN configuration and control protocols as the base for the network infrastructure supporting NFV.
Want to know more about SDN and NFV? In conjunction with the ETSI collaboration, we’ve released the OpenFlow-enabled SDN and NFV solution brief. The solution brief showcases how operators combine NFV and SDN to achieve the common goals of both technologies. It discusses the new IP connectivity challenges imposed by NFV, and presents use cases that demonstrate how OpenFlow-enabled SDN can meet the need for automated, open, and programmable network connectivity to support NFV. The NFV solution brief provides insight into how OpenFlow-enabled SDN can accelerate NFV deployments by offering a scalable, elastic, and on-demand architecture well suited to the dynamic NFV communications requirements for both virtual and physical networking infrastructures.
ONF is excited about this collaboration with ETSI as we believe this relationship can significantly contribute to the goals of the NFV ISG, which we have pledged to support since it was formed, as well as become a relevant source of requirements and use cases for the SDN community. Collaborations like this will maintain the theme of openness within the SDN community for the benefit of users.
- Dan Pitt, Executive Director
