Your new favorite NFV initiative: OPNFV

ITEM: A collective of telecoms operators and vendors (mainly the latter) has banded together with the Linux Foundation to develop an open-source platform to speed up development of NFV.

Its called the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV), it's billed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project,and it aims todevelop a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that operators and vendors can use to ensure consistency and interoperability between various open source components.

According to a statement from the group, an open platform that provides continuous testing for carrier-grade service performance is essential for telecoms players to get the most out of network virtualization.

To its credit, OPNFV realizes its not working in a vacuum, and is taking a collaborative approach with other NFV-related groups:

Because multiple open source NFV building blocks already exist, OPNFV will work with upstream projects to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.

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While not developing standards, OPNFV will work closely with ETSIs NFV ISG, among others, to drive consistent implementation of standards for an open NFV reference platform. When open source software development is aligned with standards development, it can root out issues early, identify resolutions and become the de facto codebase, resulting in a far more economical approach to platform development.

It also has the blessing of OpenDaylight and OpenStack, both of which will collaborate with OPNFV.

OPNFV says it will license new components under the Apache License Version 2.0 and will work within the licensing requirements of upstream projects in order to contribute code back to these projects. A Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee (TSC) will govern the initiative.

The group says its initial scope will focus on building "NFV infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualized Infrastructure Management (VIM) leveraging existing open source components where possible.

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Your new favorite NFV initiative: OPNFV