A total of 23 Service Providers and Solution Vendors have announced their intent to join the Open Source MANO (OSM) Community in the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona focused on delivering an open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack aligned with ETSI NFV Information Models. OSM has been created under the umbrella of ETSI and it is an operator-led community to meet the requirements of production NFV networks such as a common Information Model (IM) that has been defined, implemented and released in open source software.
Founding members of OSM include Telefónica, BT, Canonical, Intel, Mirantis, RIFT.io, Telekom Austria Group, and Telenor, along with other initial participants such as Benu Networks, Brocade, Comptel, Dell, Indra, Korea Telecom, Metaswitch, RADWare, Red Hat, Sandvine, SK Telecom, Sprint, Telmex, xFlow and 6WIND. More information can be found in the ETSI portal page for OSM: http://osm.etsi.org.
OSM’s charter consists of working with the community to deliver a production-quality open source MANO stack under Apache Public License 2.0. The initial OSM code base is already capable of orchestrating complex NFV use cases using vendor-neutral Information Models capable of capturing all the significant features of the E2E service and the requirements of the individual components or virtual network functions (VNFs).
Having a community-based code capable of orchestrating NFV scenarios, creates also a high degree of certainty around the information model that is consumed, allowing the vendors to deliver their solutions rapidly and in a cost-effective manner to their customers. Thus, OSM is expected to enable a wide eco-system of NFV components —VNFs and MANO solutions— compliant with such modelling, OSM’s project scope covers both Resource and Service Orchestration to allow automated deployment and interconnection of all components, both for NFV network scenarios and the management of Network Service Life Cycles.
The project is ignited by a functional software drop that integrates existing open source modules from Telefonica’s OpenMANO project, Canonical’s Juju generic VNF Manager and Rift.io orchestrator. An OSM project ignition demonstration in the Intel booth at MWC2016 The OSM project ignition demonstration is available in the Intel booth Hall 3, 3D30 at MWC2016.
It showcases the feasibility of the first selection of operator use cases. Starting with seed code contributions and using commercial VNFs, it proves the key guiding architectural tenets of OSM such as layering, abstraction, modularity and simplicity, and it delivers functionality for end-to-end automation, Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA), SDN underlay control, multi-site capability, multi-VIM capability (OpenStack and OpenVIM) while supporting a combination of multi-tenant and single-tenant VNFs and connections to external physical lines.
The goal of the demo is to demonstrate resource orchestration (RO) through several VNF deployments, at different sites and with different VIMs and EPA support. The use case demonstrates how the initial implementation of OSM can be used to deploy a high performance inter site router infrastructure that can be used to build a VPN service on top which, in turn, can chain value-added services such as corporate VoIP (instantiated as an IMS deployment). All this can be rapidly deployed using the OSM stack and relying exclusively on VNF and NS descriptors, with not need of per-use case particularization at NFVI, NFVO or OSS levels.
“ETSI OSM complements the work of the ETSI NFV ISG and vice versa. It will provide an opportunity to capitalize on the synergy between standardization and open source approaches by accessing a greater and more diverse set of contributors and developers than would normally be possible. This maximizes innovation, efficiency and time to market and ensures a continuing series of conformant reference implementations,” said Luis Jorge Romero, ETSI Director General.