The Linux Foundation announced on Tuesday that Platform for Network Data Analytics (PNDA) is now a Linux Foundation Project.
PNDA is taking aim at deploying analytics applications and services across entire networks. It combines big data architecture, tools and techniques to provide network information to service providers and enterprise customers at scale.
While NFV, automation and orchestration have made real-time networking provisioning a reality, legacy OSS/BSS systems aren’t nearly as agile. (See IDC: Big Data Revenues to Hit $187B by 2019 and The Evolution of Big Data in the Service Provider Domain.) Legacy OSS/BSS architectures are comprised of a number of point solutions that are integrated in silos with collections of data sources.
PNDA's solution includes decoupling data sources from data customers in order to integrate the data sources once and then make the data available for any application to process, according to its website. PNDA supports batch and real-time streaming data exploration and analysis at the scale of millions of messages per second.
"The adoption of open source software has transformed the networking industry by reducing technology fragmentation and increasing user adoption," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation , in a prepared statement. "PNDA addresses a critical need for a scalable platform that fosters innovation in reactive network analytics for both service providers and enterprises."
PNDA started out as Cisco's open-source platform for network data analytics and it has contributed its code to PNDA for management, application packaging and deployment. Other supporters of the PNDA effort include Deepfield, FRINX, Intersec, Moogsoft, NGENA, Ontology, OpenDataSoft and Tupl.
The first release of PNDA is available on OpenStack-based platforms with additional support for bare-metal and public-cloud provisioning slated for later this year.
Future open-source community contributions for PNDA are expected, including Hadoop distribution independence, platform infrastructure validation, container support, additional data publishers and deep-learning framework integration, among others.
PNDA also works with software defined networking, network functions virtualization and network orchestration efforts including OpenDaylight, Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) and FD.io.
PNDA also claims to have synergy with the Open Data Platform initiative (ODPi), which defines a common runtime specification, reference implementation and test suite for Hadoop-based distributions.
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation