Ciena announced that it will offer a fully-supported commercial version of its Open Networking Operating System (ONOS).
Blue Planet ONOS will extend Ciena’s Blue Planet network orchestration software to enable scalable, flow-based control of data center networks.
ONOS, backed by ON.Lab and several service providers and vendors, is a complete open source, carrier-grade, SDN operating system that enables agile service creation and deployment at scale on any hardware.
The company said this platform delivers a highly available, scalable SDN control plane featuring northbound and southbound open APIs that can enable diverse management, control, and service applications across mission-critical networks.
An early and notable application for ONOS is the Central Office Re-Architected as a Data Center (CORD) project.
CORD provides the framework for service providers to re-architect their traditional central offices into next-generation data centers. This is critical as service providers move to enable much greater network and service programmability by leveraging SDN and virtualization technologies.
The ultimate goal is to provide end customers with next-generation, on-demand services and content that leverage a lower cost web-scale infrastructure.
Ciena’s hardened version of ONOS, to be marketed as Blue Planet ONOS, gives service providers the ability to take advantage of the cumulative software expertise of the open source community combined with the level of assurance and support that users require for commercial deployment.
Blue Planet ONOS is backed by Ciena’s software, service and support teams. Any enhancements Ciena makes to ONOS for customer engagements will be fed back into the open source community. Ciena’s Blue Planet ONOS, which aligns with the Falcon release of ONOS, is projected to be available in the first calendar quarter of 2016.