Overview
Telecom and over-the-top (OTT) content providers as well as mainstream enterprises are under increasing competitive pressure to deliver new services ever more quickly, in more locations. Customer expectations, set by online consumer experiences, necessitate a growing need to overhaul operational and business models to avoid being left behind.
Conventional service delivery methods involving extensive manual processes, disjoint configuration, provisioning, service assurance systems, and hardware-centricity significantly limit the speed for new service delivery and innovation. Consequently, it has never been more important for operators and enterprise IT groups to embrace the imminent transformation catalyzed by SDN and NFV.
Open source SDN enables the vendor- and hardware-independent network infrastructure essential towards overhauling the service delivery lifecycle. Automation of physical and virtual elements is essential to achieve time-to-market advantages.
Challenges
Most large organizations have large investments in existing hardware from multiple vendors, customized back-end systems that are expensive to radically change, well-established processes along with specially trained operations staff, and a culture that will take time to change. Yet a more flexible approach to deploying and managing network services is necessary–without forklifting their entire operations and retraining their entire staff.
Why OpenDaylight?
OpenDaylight, through its broad commercial ecosystem, offers a flexible and open SDN platform to enable automated service delivery, including:
- Model-Driven Service Abstraction Layer (MD-SAL), which leverages industry standard YANG models to map network applications to the underlying devices to readily support hardware and technologies entrenched in the existing network
- Modular southbound (i.e., Controller to Device) plug-ins with extensive support for standard network management interfaces, OpenFlow, and proprietary interfaces and devices
- Intent-based Northbound (i.e., Network Application to Controller) interfaces exposing SDN capabilities to diverse network applications, while abstracting the underlying infrastructure details
- Network virtualization along with flexible policy mechanisms to achieve multi-tenancy in a multi-service environment
- Broad industry acceptance, including the largest open source community for any controller
By enabling IT organizations to mix and match network applications and devices, OpenDaylight provides a powerful platform to automate and operationalize intelligent service delivery within existing environments.
Examples
Major global operators have deployed OpenDaylight to automate service delivery to improve agility, increase new revenues, and reduce their operational costs.