ETSI Releases Latest Open Source MANO Code

MADRID -- Network Virtualization Europe -- Keen to remind the industry that ONAP isn't the only management and orchestration game in town, European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) announced the latest release of its Open Source MANO (OSM) code and, importantly, issued an accompanying paper about the "lessons learned" from the development and implementation of the software in NFV deployments.

OSM was formed just over two years ago, building on Telefónica's OpenMANO Project, and boasts support from the likes of ADVA, Bell Mobility, BT, CableLabs, Intel, Mavenir, Red Hat, Sprint, Telenor and Verizon. The aim has been to develop "a fully functional orchestrator for NFV implemented as open source and aligned to the ETSI NFV framework." (See OSM Demos First Steps to Open Source MANO.)

Release Four "constitutes a huge leap forward in terms of functionality, user experience and maturity," notes ETSI in its official announcement about the release, highlighting improvements in monitoring and assurance, ease of installation, a "leaner footprint" (up to 75% less RAM consumption) and the addition of a new northbound interface, aligned with ETSI NFV specifications, that enables a single management view of an OSM installation.

Naturally, the operators supporting the initiative were positive and upbeat about the enhancements and the growing industry support for OSM: Telenor Group (Nasdaq: TELN)'s Pal Gronsund spent part of his presentation here extolling its virtues, saying it has "a lot of great features, much of what we have been looking for. It's a carrier-grade MANO stack… [and is] very important for interoperability."

Francisco Javier Ramón Salguero, head of the Network Virtualisation Initiative and NFV Reference Lab at Telefónica SA (NYSE: TEF)'s GCTO Unit, told Light Reading that significant advances have been made in terms of performance management, monitoring and virtual network function (VNF) onboarding, and highlighted the contributions and important feedback from other operators and AWS, noting that members play a vital role in the group without necessarily contributing code to the initiative.

— Ray Le Maistre, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading

This is an edited version of a story that was originally published on Telco Transformation's sister site, Light Reading. To see the full story, click here.