NFV/SDN Reality Check: Verizon Joins ONOS, Bolsters Open Source - Episode 44

On this week’s NFV/SDN Reality Check, we take a look at some of the top news stories from the past week as well as speak with the ONOS project as it welcomes a new member on its 1-year anniversary.

First, let’s take a look at some of the top headlines from the past week.

OpenStack continues to see considerable demand for trained programmers, which has resulted in a growing push towards online course options.

One firm specializing in the technology, Mirantis, said it witnessed a doubling in the number of students taking its OpenStack training program last year, swelling to more than 5,000 people in 2015 compared with its 2014 numbers. Mirantis noted it added two new courses and 15 new locations in 2015, pushing its availability to 85 locations worldwide.

Mirantis said its programs are vendor agnostic, and touch in OpenStack implementations across hypervisors, storage backends and network topologies.

The announcement follows word from the Linux Foundation late last year for its own online training course targeting OpenStack software, stating the move was necessary as accelerated adoption of OpenStack has resulted in a shortage of qualified OpenStack administrators.

A new report from vendor NFWare claims more than $600 million was invested last year in SDN and NFV startups, and that the market also began to witness consolidation efforts that are further reshaping the space.

Some of the larger reported investments included $110 million into CloudFlare, from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Baidu; $100 million into Illumio, which provides security solutions targeting data centers and cloud deployments; and $100 million into Mirantis from investors Intel Capital, Goldman Sachs and Ericsson, among others.

Also this week the ONOS project celebrated its 1-year anniversary by announcing it had added Verizon as a member to the open source SDN focused organization.

Verizon joins fellow telecom operators AT&T, China Unicom, NTT Communications and SK Telecom in the project. While bitter rivals in the domestic telecom market, AT&T said the addition of Verizon to the group should help bolster the development and deployment of open source-based virtualization platforms.

To get more on the news as well as an update on its progress, I recently had the chance to speak with Guru Parulkar, Executive Director and Board Member at the ONOS project. Guru started by providing some background on himself as well as an overview of the ONOS projects work over the past year.

Thanks for watching this week’s NFV/SDN Reality Check and make sure to check us out again next week.

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