NFV & SDN Summit, Paris, 18 March 2014
Expanded relationship to further NFV adoption; OpenFlow-enabled SDN and NFV Solutions Brief published to outline how OpenFlow-enabled SDN can accelerate NFV deployments
ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, an industry-led standards development organization, and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced a strategic partnership agreement to further the development of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) specifications.
Both organizations have a shared commitment to supporting the needs of network operators seeking to benefit from advances in open networking. The formal agreement was approved today at the ETSI General Assembly meeting in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, France.
ETSI and ONF have maintained a strong working relationship since ETSI’s unveiling of the NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) in 2012. The NFV architecture is supported by SDN and benefits from ONF’s work with the OpenFlow™ protocol. Together, the organizations will explore how SDN can enable forwarding-plane support for some of the most important NFV use cases. In particular, our two organizations will collaborate on the means to build dynamic, programmable Virtualized Network Function (VNF) forwarding graphs. ETSI’s NFV ISG has launched a call for NFV Proofs of Concept (PoC) and published a PoC framework. ETSI is now keen to see PoCs that employ both NFV and SDN and showcase the benefits of both technologies.
"ETSI is focused on addressing the problems that telecommunications networks face today by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types onto industry standard high volume servers, switches and storage," said Luis Jorge Romero, director-general of ETSI. "This collaboration with ONF allows us to both significantly contribute to the goals of the NFV ISG, and serve as a relevant source for requirements and use cases for the SDN community."
In conjunction with this agreement, ONF is also releasing the OpenFlow-enabled SDN and NFV solution brief. The solution brief showcases how operators are combining NFV and SDN to achieve the common goals of both technologies to achieve greater agility of the networks. It discusses the network challenges that operators will need to overcome to implement NFV, and presents use cases that demonstrate how OpenFlow-enabled SDN can meet the need for automated, open, and programmable network connectivity to support NFV. The NFV solution brief will provide insight into how OpenFlow-enabled SDN can accelerate NFV deployments by offering a scalable, elastic, and on-demand architecture well suited to the dynamic NFV communications requirements for both virtual and physical networking infrastructures.
"The goal of the ONF relationship with the ETSI NFV ISG to further the adoption of NFV by network operators," said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. "Together, we can serve as a critical source of requirements and solutions for the open networking community. Both organizations will benefit from sharing technical work and adopting a complementary approach to the development of standards, methodologies, and knowledge sharing."
The OpenFlow-enabled SDN and NFV solution brief can be accessed on the ONF website at: https://www.opennetworking.org/images/stories/downloads/sdn-resources/solution-briefs/sb-sdn-nvf-solution.pdf.
About ETSI
ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, aeronautical, broadcast and internet technologies. ETSI is an independent, not-for-profit association whose more than 700 member companies and organizations, drawn from 62 countries across 5 continents worldwide, determine its work programme and participate directly in its work. For more information about ETSI, please see www.etsi.org
About ONF
Launched in 2011 by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo!, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a growing nonprofit organization with more than 140 members whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of open SDN. ONF promotes open SDN and OpenFlow technologies and standards while fostering a vibrant market of products, services, applications, customers, and users. For further details visit the ONF website at: www.opennetworking.org
ONF U.S. Media Contact:
Andi Bean
McGrath/Power Public Relations for ONF
+1 408-727-0351
AndiBean@mcgrathpower.com
ETSI Media Contact:
Claire Boyer
ETSI Communications
+33 (0)6 87 60 84 40
claire.boyer@etsi.org