Bithika Khargharia shares a recap of the OpenDaylight Summit and ONF’s participation in the event.
With great industry discussion between attendees and presenters, the OpenDaylight Summit was nothing short of a success. The three day event in Seattle covered hot topics surrounding the latest technologies and trends in open SDN. I was lucky enough to be able to participate, alongside others, in multiple presentations during the summit. In case you were unable to attend, I’ve highlighted key points from the presentations below.
On the first day of the OpenDaylight Summit, we ran an hour long panel with representation from four ONF OpenSourceSDN.org projects – Boulder, Atrium Enterprise, Centennial & Snowmass. The panel demonstrated tremendous relevance by sharing how the individual projects were addressing real-world challenges in Transport SDN, Application NBI, and Enterprise SDN. There was in-depth discussion on key technical artifacts that the projects were producing which helped the audience appreciate how these projects were adding value to the OpenDaylight (ODL) Controller and how the growing ODL community could participate in these projects. The panel discussions also highlighted how these Open Source projects were translating ONF’s standards work – Common Information Model (CIM), OTWG, NBI etc. into consumable software in vertically-integrated use case driven solutions. We also touched upon contested topics such as what is the right home for some of these Open Source projects – ONF or ODL? Trials, POCs and Operator Engagements were a central theme of the panel, and each project had rich information to share. It’s always wonderful to see cross-panelists discussions often times leading to cross-pollination of ideas and future collaborations. This panel was rife with that and the discussions and takeaways were rich.
We started the second day of the conference with a keynote on Microsoft IT use case for Atrium Enterprise. Two senior Microsoft IT Executives shared their strategic goals for a leaner, agile IT as it continues to deal with its mobile workforce with mostly flat IT budgets. We also talked about the specific use case for Microsoft IT and how Atrium Enterprise is addressing that. With only 20 minutes onstage we did not have time for questions but following the presentation we had tremendous interested from various ODL sub-projects to enhance things such as ODL scalability and HA as required by Microsoft IT trial of Atrium Enterprise. In addition, other Enterprises that were in the audience expressed similar pain points that they had and if/how Atrium Enterprise could be adopted for their scenarios. At ONF OpenSourceSDN.org we are always seeking more “customer” engagement and this keynote lent us the visibility to precisely gain that. The morning keynote was followed by a more technical deep-dive in the afternoon lead by ONF’s own David Lenrow, project lead for Boulder & Atrium Enterprise. The presentation dealt with the details of what Atrium Enterprise is building – a VNF that would sit on the edge of the network right behind a building router and would make decisions on WAN steering for Skype for Business and Internet offload for all other traffic. The team is closely working with Microsoft IT for a trial targeted for end of the year.
- Bithika Khargharia, ONF OSSDN Director of Product and Community Management and Principal Engineer at Extreme Networks
