Released: Friday, July 31, 2015
Open source technology is becoming increasingly important in service providers’ virtualization strategies because it can: significantly reduce the time and cost of developing new products and services; enable greater multivendor interoperability than the traditional standardization model does; and increase network security by allowing more people to scrutinize the underlying code.
In this report we:
- provide an overview of open source
- discuss how it is fundamentally different from traditional methods of collaboration and standardization
- examine how it enables NFV and SDN
- identify the biggest challenges, many of which are cultural
- look at the major players in open source initiatives focusing on NFV and SDN such as the Open Networking Foundation, OpenDaylight, OpenStack and Open Platform for NFV
- look at what these open-source groups are currently doing to advance NFV and SDN deployment and how service providers and suppliers view open source
- examine how open source can provide the multi-vendor interoperability that network operators seek while preserving vendors’ ability to differentiate their products based on more than price alone
From the analyst
– Open source for NFV and SDN: The big changes aren’t just technological
– Three reasons why open-source software is good for network operators
– Open source: Too many cooks?
