Linux Foundation's OpenDaylight Fluorine Release Brings Streamlined Support for Cloud, Edge and WAN Solutions

Most pervasive open source SDN controller issues ninth platform release as more users and open source platforms leverage OpenDaylight Project to achieve promise of SDN/NFV

SAN FRANCISCO, September 13, 2018–The OpenDaylight Project, the leading open source platform for programmable, software-defined networks, today announced its ninth release, OpenDaylight Fluorine. The latest version brings major advancements for solution providers through key enhancements to the platform, including simplified packaging to speed solution development and enhanced capabilities for key use cases.

“Fluorine is one of the most streamlined releases to date for OpenDaylight, delivering a core set of mature components needed for most major use cases in a ‘managed release’ for easy consumption by commercial and in-house solution providers, as well as by downstream projects such as ONAP and OpenStack,” said Phil Robb, vice president, Operations, Networking, and Orchestration, The Linux Foundation. “In addition, the release includes critical updates to clustering and service assurance to improve scalability, security and reliability to support our large end user deployments – including solutions from Cornell University, Globo.com, Orange,  Tencent, and others using all OpenDaylight to further their open networking initiatives.”

OpenDaylight is also seeing ongoing industry momentum as more users deploy the platform to realize the power of open SDN/NFV.  For example, Globo.com, a leading internet-related services and platforms company based in Brazil, is using OpenDaylight as their primary SDN controller platform. A new case study details the benefits the company is seeing from using OpenDaylight to deploy ACLs on virtual switches. FRINX has demonstrated customer success stories with its OpenDaylight Distribution together with SoftBank and China Telecom BRI while Red Hat’s new functional release in Red Hat OpenStack Platform (OSP) version 13 also features OpenDaylight.

OpenDaylight’s latest release includes new features important for cloud and edge environments, service function chaining, WAN connectivity, and optical transport. More details on what’s new in OpenDaylight Fluorine are outlined below.

Enhanced Functionality for Key SDN  Use Cases

• WAN Connectivity. Fluorine includes an extremely mature and robust BGP stack, with improvements in BGPCEP and BGP/MPLS multicast support, making OpenDaylight a clear leader in SD-WAN innovation.

• Optical Transport. Work on optical transport, including the TransportPCE project, has been nurtured within OpenDaylight for some time. Fluorine formally releases Transport PCE for the first time, as a component of the managed release. In addition, Fluorine  provides a new reference implementation for OpenROADM-based optical infrastructures control.

• Cloud/edge Computing. Several new features were added to further enhance support for network virtualization within cloud and edge computing environments. This includes improved IPv6 support, support for both stateful and stateless security groups, and SR-IOV hardware offload for OVS. Much of this work has been developed for OpenStack environments, and is now being leveraged to integrate ODL with the Container Orchestration Engine for Kubernetes environments.  

• Service Function Chaining (SFC). Updates to SFC accelerate delivery of services like network slicing, now supported by OpenvSwitch (OVS), allowing for improved adoption of SFC in the marketplace.

Increased Stability and Reliability

The OpenDaylight Fluorine release brings improvements in stability and scale, including complex bug fixes and enhancements to OpenDaylight infrastructure clustering capability. In addition, the new managed release process facilitates more thorough integration testing of the mature components, ensuring that release as a whole operates seamlessly.

Continued Cross-Community Integration

OpenDaylight continued its deep engagement with other open source projects and standards bodies such as OpenStack, OPNFV, Kubernetes, and ONAP. Notably, ODL code is integrated into OPNFV’s CI/CD toolchain, which slashes the time it takes the OPNFV community to provide feedback to ODL contributors from months to days.

Looking Ahead

The OpenDaylight project is hosting a Developer Forum in Amsterdam from September 23-24, in advance of the next platform release, Neon. The Neon release is expected in early 2019. Additional information and registration details can be found here.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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Additional Resources

• OpenDaylight Ecosystem Directory
• Learn About OpenDaylight Membership
• OpenDaylight Blog
• OpenDaylight Events

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