Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Lenovo and Comcast Join the OpenDaylight Project 

The OpenDaylight Project, a community-led and industry-supported open source platform to advance Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced that Comcast and Lenovo have joined the project to support the development of an open, common SDN and NFV platform to enable network automation and programmability.

"We're seeing more end users starting to adopt OpenDaylight and participate in its development as the community sharpens its focus on stability, scalability, security and performance," said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight. "Comcast has been testing ODL and working with our community since launch and the team at Lenovo were heavily involved in ODL's foundation through their roots at IBM. Our members see the long-term value of creating a rich ecosystem around open systems and OpenDaylight."

Comcast Cable is the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone provider to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build an advanced network that delivers among the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings. The company is embracing SDN as part of its long-term network vision and has been contributing to OpenDaylight with its partner CableLabs in a project called PacketCable PCMM. Chris Luke, principal engineer at Comcast, is also a part of the OpenDaylight Advisory Group that was formed to provide technical and strategic guidance to the ODL community on challenges of running real-world networks. He recently shared an overview of Comcast's long-term plan for networking and their key use cases for OpenDaylight, summarized in a blog published today.

"With an ever-growing number of endpoints to manage, evolving our SDN and NFV capabilities becomes increasingly important," said Rakesh Puri, executive director of network applications and systems at Comcast. "We've actively participated in OpenDaylight since the beginning and have seen both the codebase and ecosystem continue to mature in ways that are trending positively for service providers. We are excited to continue our work with the community and Advisory Group so everyone, especially our customers, can benefit from this change."

Lenovo is a $39 billion global Fortune 500 company and a leader in providing innovative consumer, commercial, and enterprise technology. Its portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services covers PCs, workstations, servers, storage, networking, smart TVs and a family of mobile products and apps. Lenovo Networking, part of the IBM x86 acquisition, has been involved in OpenDaylight since its inception, in addition to being first to market with OpenFlow-embedded switches for blades, plus has a portfolio of Top-of-Rack Ethernet 1/10/40G switches.

"We believe that the open approach is the faster way to deploy solutions, and what we've seen OpenDaylight achieve in just two years has been impressive," said Igor Marty, chief technology officer, Lenovo Worldwide SDN and NFV. "The OpenDaylight community is truly leading the path toward interoperability by integrating legacy and emerging southbound protocols and defining northbound APIs for orchestration. We look forward to contributing to their efforts."

Comcast's Chris Luke is appearing on a user panel at the OpenDaylight Summit this July 27-31, 2015, in Santa Clara along with other members of the OpenDaylight Advisory Group. With OpenDaylight's third software release 'Lithium' coming in June 2015, the Summit provides a forum for enterprises and service providers to explore the latest release, learn how it is being tested in production and get hands-on support for implementing their own Proofs-of-Concept. It includes over 80 tutorials, sessions and keynotes. For more information, visit http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opendaylight-summit.

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