Learn about ONF’s Common Information Model work and how it will benefit network operators as well as their respective organizations.
Information modeling holds significant value for network operators and their companies, but this is one area in the SDN landscape that has admittedly been a little lacking. We’ve aimed to address this need through our Common Information Model (CIM) work, and I recently shared some additional information about this project with Network Computing readers. Here’s a quick excerpt:
Information modeling may seem like an arcane aspect of computer networking, but it has huge implications for the level of consistency -- and therefore interoperability -- that product developers, service providers, and open source projects bring to their respective products, services, and architectures. That’s why the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) launched its CIM work in 2014.
Our goal is to help foster development of an industry-wide, open CIM that reduces unnecessary variety in how developers represent a given concept or problem. Having a CIM, a process for using the CIM to generate implementation views, and tools that consistently generate the implementations is key to ensuring unambiguous and interoperable products as well as open source software.
This also helps reduce errors and enables code to be more easily produced. For network operators who want to build best-of-breed networks, it enables them to compare apples to apples and take full advantage of the latest abstractions and virtualization technologies.
To learn more about information modeling and ONF’s CIM work, read the full article at Network Computing.
- Dan Pitt, Executive Director
