The Linux Foundation has taken another open-source project under its wing, one that’s focused on the architecture, implementation and support of digital networks.

Called the Platform for Network Data Analytics (or “PNDA” for short), the initiative aims to better integrate and manage massive amounts of network information, and deploy analytics applications and services.

“PNDA addresses a critical need for a scalable platform that fosters innovation in reactive network analytics for both service providers and enterprises,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, in a statement.

To coincide with the announcement, the PNDA community has just shipped out its first version of the software, which is described as a production-ready solution for platforms based on OpenStack.

PNDA is an analytics platform that’s built on Apache Software Foundation tools like Spark, Kafka, Zookeper and Grafana, which works to aggregate data from logs, metrics and network telemetry then store it in its rawest possible form, for as long as possible. The software supports both batch and real-time streaming data exploration and analysis, at a scale of millions of messages per second. In a nutshell, the software is all about making it easier to gather and crunch data from diverse sources, doing away with the need for customized integrations.

Cisco Systems Ltd. is the biggest contributor to the project, donating code that enables “end-to-end platform provisioning and management, application packaging, and deployment”. Other contributors include lesser-known players like Deepfield Networks Inc., FRINX, Intersec Group, Moogsoft Inc., NGENA GmbH, Ontology Systems,OpenDataSoft and Tupl Inc.

The PNDA’s backers say the project complements software-defined networking, network functions virtualization and network orchestration projects like OpenDayLight and the OPNFV, as well as OpenStack.

“There have been significant efforts across the industry in NFV, automation, orchestration and control which have made real-time network service provisioning possible,” said David Ward, SVP, Chief Architect and CTO at Cisco. “Open source software implementations supporting this space are also maturing as shown by OpenStack and OpenDaylight. In comparison, industry efforts to enable the monitoring and analysis of the data produced by these services have been lagging behind.”

The Linux Foundation says that developers are planning further enhancements for PNDA, with features such as bare-metal server support, container support, deep-learning framework integration, Hadoop distribution independence, platform infrastructure validation, and public cloud provisioning all planned for future releases.

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