Sarwar Raza of Networking at HP to Lead New Working Group’s Efforts in 2014
PALO ALTO, Calif., December 5, 2013 – The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced the appointment of Sarwar Raza, director of Cloud Networking and SDN in the Advanced Technology Group within the Networking organization at HP, as chairperson of the Northbound Interfaces (NBI) Working Group.
“ONF began its work on Northbound Interfaces in 2012 as part of the Architecture and Framework Working Group’s study of existing SDN NBI use cases and controller Northbound Interfaces,” said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. “Since that time the number of approaches to the Northbound Interface has mushroomed to more than 20 and we have catalogued NBIs at many latitudes and longitudes. The profusion has created a confusion of programmatic interfaces that network-service vendors, orchestration systems, and application developers must write to in order to serve diverse SDN use cases. We are taking the lead in helping end users, operators, and programmers better understand what NBIs serve what needs, and we welcome the collaboration of other standards bodies, industry forums, and open source communities to jointly develop and implement these interfaces.”
The NBI Working Group was established in October 2013 and is designed to develop information models for NBIs, validated by prototyping and gaining end-user feedback on selected examples with real code. The NBI Working Group conducted its first NBI Leadership Roundtable and Working Group meeting in California during the month of November. The event was intended to help bring cogency to the wide industry interest in this important area of SDN so the WG invited and welcomed leading speakers from major stakeholders and relevant organizations including ETSI NFV, IETF, ITU-T, OpenDaylight, OpenStack, TM Forum, Open Grid Forum, and UCI Forum. The event also gathered more than 50 member-company representatives and included presentations from China Mobile, Freescale, Huawei, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Lync, NEC, and Radware.
“Our work in the NBI Working Group is targeted at enabling the acceleration of open SDN adoption and innovation by codifying multi-vendor, multi-controller SDN Northbound Interfaces,” said Sarwar Raza. “The aim is not only to gain understanding but also to have working implementations on both open-source and vendor controllers by the end of 2014.”
Initial information modeling for the NBI Working Group will be completed in 2014. For more information, please visit: https://opennetworking.org/working-groups/working-groups-overview.
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 100 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: https://opennetworking.org.
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