A river runs through IT: OPNFV unleashes its Colorado NFV platform

• OPNFV releases 'Colorado' platform
• New version designed to accelerate NFV application and services development
• OpenDaylight has also rolled out its 'Boron' SDN platform

The Open NFV Project (OPNFV) this week released Colorado, the latest and third platform release for the open source project set up to work in close collaboration with ‘upstream’ open source communities to test and integrate code for the open NFV platform.  

Colorado is claimed to feature critical advances designed to accelerate NFV application and services development by addressing, in particular, security, IPv6, Service Function Chaining (SFC), testing, VPN capabilities, and support for multiple hardware architectures.

“Colorado represents a more robust version of OPNFV’s previous Brahmaputra platform,” claims Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV, who says that the release should lay a foundation for NFV applications and services through  key feature enhancements, greater integration and additional testing capabilities.

The key enhancements include:

• Core feature upgrades, the fruit of collaboration with upstream communities. All feature enhancements are integrated into the automated install/deploy/testing framework.
• Enhanced security by earning the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge for best practices in open source development; additionally, the Moon project has been prototyping identity federation and management for OpenStack and OpenDaylight.
• Service Function Chaining (SFC) now runs across multiple nodes, includes installer support for VNF Manager (Tacker) installation and support for enhanced cloud scenarios.
• Improved IPv6 support includes IPv6-only deployments, full underlay and overlay support and integration with additional install tools.
• The SDN VPN project now enables full Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN support including BGP peering.
• Full support for multiple hardware architectures, including both ARM® and x86 architectures.

Enhanced testing capabilities: Colorado also achieves greater integration across testing projects with additional feature testing capabilities, and increased automation.

Infrastructure and testing environment advancements: The Phros Test Lab project continues to be a key element of OPNFV release development and validation. Colorado brings increased governance, consistency, availability and quality to the labs, increasing efficiency and creating the groundwork for a robust Lab-as-a-Service program.

Community expansion. Improved cross-project collaboration via working groups focused on Management and Operation (MANO), Infrastructure, Security, and Testing. OPNFV says it continues to build relationships with key upstream communities such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenContrail, FD.io, OVS, Open-O, OpenBaton, KVM, DPDK, ODP, and Linux.

• OpenDaylight has also been doing some rolling out: its 'Boron' SDN platform release was timed to hit just before the  OpenDaylight Summit which kicks off in Seattle today.  This is OpenDaylight's fifth SDN platform iteration and it says the  focus is on the cloud, NFV, performance and tools, all improved by contributions by consortium members in a range of areas.