ONOS has announced the availability of the second release of its open networking operating system, Blackbird, promising to bring carrier grade Software Defined Networking (SDN) implementation option for service providers. The ONOS Blackbird release includes a set of metrics to effectively measure performance and other carrier-grade attributes of the SDN control plane.
ONOS claims that it is the first open source platform to define and publish a comprehensive set of metrics for effectively evaluating the "carrier-grade quotient" of SDN control plane platforms/controllers. Metrics currently used to measure performance, including simplistic ones such as "Cbench," do not provide a complete or accurate view of the SDN control plane capabilities thereby highlighting the need for a more indicative set of measurements, said ONOS.
As service providers start deploying SDN solutions not only in their labs but also to control and manage their carrier-scale networks, high performance, scalability and resilience become key architectural requirements for these solutions. Carrier-grade SDN platforms and solutions need to demonstrate these attributes and measure and qualify them with effective metrics.
Guru Parulkar, Executive Director for ON.Lab
Achieving the high availability required to deliver network resilience at the necessary scale without compromising performance as you add controller instances has been an elusive goal for open source SDN solutions and a barrier to adoption—until now.
