Santa Clara, Calif. -- This week's Open Networking Summit saw open source projects spreading wide and multiplying. And that raised the question: Is it too much?
The conference kicked off Monday with an update to the Central Office Redesigned as a Data Center (CORD) project, as well as progress on CORD's parent organization, ONOS, which announced new members, a CORD reference design implementation and a new approach to simplify management of virtual machines and containers. (See CORD Connecting as ONOS Expands.)
Representatives of SK Telecom (Nasdaq: SKM), Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), China Unicom and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) described how they're using CORD to enable 5G and other mobile apps, including virtual reality and advanced enterprise and residential services. (See CORD Opens Door to Virtual Reality & More.)
AT&T introduced ECOMP, a massive two-year project for network engine software. The Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy platform is designed to automate network services and infrastructure. (See AT&T Shares ECOMP Vision, Might Share Software.)
Is it all too much? Steve Garrison, VP marketing for white box switch vendor Pica8 Inc. , says open source is killing the service provider industry -- vendors are finding it tough to make money, while network operators are being buried under the weight of proliferating standards. (See Open Source Is Killing Us.)
That warning is not lost on open source advocates. Guru Parulkar, executive director of ON.Lab, warned that open source groups must work harder to build and support integrated solutions for network operators or risk losing out to proprietary systems. (See ON.Lab: Open Source Must Also Integrate.)
Facebook is one of the world's leading open source practitioners. Director of network engineering Omar Baldonado described how operations over features is the "guiding principle" for running the social network. (See Facebook: Operations Comes First.)
In other ONS news: We visited a dark room of despair. (See The Saddest Place at Open Networking Summit.)
— Mitch Wagner, , West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading.