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LITHIUM OVERVIEW

Lithium is the third release of OpenDaylight, the open source platform for building programmable, software-defined networks. With Lithium, service providers and enterprises can transition to SDN with particular focus on broadening the programmability of intelligent networks. They can compose their own service architectures or leverage an OpenDaylight-based commercial offering to deliver dynamic network services in a cloud environment, craft dynamic intent-based policies and begin virtualizing functions with Service Function Chaining (SFC). OpenDaylight’s architecture is leveraged by a growing number of commercial products and solutions, as well as the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV).

OpenDaylight is a highly available, modular, extensible, scalable and multi-protocol controller infrastructure built for SDN deployments on modern heterogeneous multi-vendor networks. OpenDaylight provides a model-driven service abstraction platform that allows users to write apps that easily work across a wide variety of hardware and south-bound protocols.

466 individuals contributed to the Lithium release making OpenDaylight one of the fastest-growing open source projects.

OPENDAYLIGHT PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE

The OpenDaylight platform provides a common foundation and a robust array of services to enable a wide breadth of applications and use cases. ODL can deliver the benefits of SDN to use cases as diverse as managing cable modems, connecting the Internet of Things, or controlling Ethernet switches using the OpenFlow protocol.

As shown in the diagram, OpenDaylight is composed of a number of different modules that can be combined as needed to meet the requirements of a given scenario. Users can download OpenDaylight directly to compose their own service architecture or leverage one of the 20+ available ODL-based commercial offerings.