OPNFV project to be chaired by HP’s Prodip Sen

Déjà vu struck the networking industry on Tuesday when a coalition of leading vendors declared that they’ve joined forces under the banner of The Linux Foundation to develop open standards meant to accelerate the adoption of next generation solutions. The elevator pitch is practically identical to that of the OpenDaylight Project the same suppliers launched last April, but the broader vision is most decisively not.

The one-and-a-half-year-old OpenDaylight Project, which marked its second major release just a day earlier, aims to unify the fragmented ecosystem of software-defined networking (SDN) solutions under a common management layer not controlled by any one player. In contrast, the new consortium with the mouthful of a name “Open Platform for NFV Project” (OPNFV) focuses on an entirely different paradigm: network function virtualization.

Whereas SDN emerged from academia as an effort to separate management functionality from traffic handling operations into a centralized layer of its own, NFV is a grassroots movement within the telecom industry to facilitate the delivery of network services without dedicated hardware. The two trends overlap in their goal of enabling greater operational agility and openness, but the industry’s biggest vendors seem to believe that technical differences are big enough to warrant two separate initiatives.

The founding members of the OPNFV include many familiar names from OpenDaylight, including networking kingpin Cisco Systems Inc., Juniper Networks Inc., IBM and several others. But the 38 launch sponsors is more than double than of the SDN initiative, thanks to the participation of newcomers such as French telecommunications equipment supplier Alcatel-Lucent SA and China Telecom Corp. Ltd., the third largest broadband provider in that country.

The primary objective of the project is to rally the NFV movement around a common platform that will incorporate “existing open source components where possible” and realize the full potential of the technology, hopefully becoming the de facto industry standard in the process. The first version is expected to ship as early as next year.

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