SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwired) — 06/29/15 — The (), a community-led and industry-supported open source platform to advance Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), announced that (), its third open SDN software release, is now available to those seeking to build and deploy SDN solutions.

“End users have already deployed OpenDaylight for a wide variety of use cases from NFV, network on demand, flow programming using OpenFlow and even Internet of Things,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight. “Lithium was built to meet the requirements of the wide range of end users embedding OpenDaylight into the heart of their products, services and infrastructures. I expect new and improved capabilities such as service chaining and network virtualization to be quickly picked up by our user base. We are really happy to see the interest the Telco/NFV community has shown in ODL.”

“We–re seeing significant participation in our community from many service providers, as well as the global research community and early adopter enterprises,” said Colin Dixon, Technical Steering Committee Chair, OpenDaylight. “We love seeing users participating very actively in our community to help drive the platform to deliver the most relevant use cases as we work to knit together cloud, SDN and NFV technologies.”

OpenDaylight is a highly available, modular, extensible, scalable and multi-protocol controller infrastructure built for SDN deployments on modern heterogeneous multi-vendor networks. OpenDaylight provides a model-driven service abstraction platform that allows users to write apps that easily work across a wide variety of hardware and southbound protocols. With Lithium, service providers and enterprises can transition to SDN with particular focus on broadening programmability of intelligent networks. They can compose their own service architectures or leverage an OpenDaylight-based commercial offering to deliver dynamic network services in a cloud environment, craft dynamic intent-based policies and virtualize functions with Service Function Chaining (SFC). Lithium is expected to be embedded in over 20 commercial products and solutions, as well as the (OPNFV).

New features and improvements delivered in the OpenDaylight Lithium release include:

OpenDaylight–s Integration Group spent significant time testing against end user-defined use cases and requirements to boost scalability and performance of core architectural components in Lithium.

Native support for the OpenStack Neutron framework combined with features such as SFC, Virtual Tenant Networking (VTN) and Group-Based Policy (GBP) allow users to easily design device, user and group-level policies including customized service chains for firewall, load balancing and other application network services.

Unified Secure Channel eases secure communication between OpenDaylight and widely distributed networking equipment; Time Series Data Repository (TSDR) enables collection and analysis of large amounts of network activity; Device Identification and Driver Management (DIDM) provides end users the ability to discover, manage and automate a wide range of existing hardware in their infrastructure; Persistence ensures application-specific data is preserved over time or in the event of a catastrophe; and Topology Processing Framework allows for filtered and/or aggregated views of a network, including multi-protocol, underlay and overlay representations.

Network Intent Composition (NIC) enables the controller to manage and direct network services and resources based on describing the “intent” for network behaviors and network policies, while Application Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) provides abstractions and services for simplified network views and network services. These new policy/intent-based abstractions augment the existing GBP project that was introduced with the Helium release. Interoperability with OpenStack Neutron has been improved and now supports better feature parity including native Distributed Virtual Router (DVR) services for more seamless cloud orchestration as well as a more robust solution.

This includes Source Group Tag eXchange (SXP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IoT Data Management (IoTDM), SMNP Plugin, Open Policy Framework (OpFlex) and Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP).

OpenDaylight has experienced tremendous growth since inception, having become the largest and most successful open source networking project with 466 people contributing over 2.3 million lines of code. Hear more from OpenDaylight developers and users during the second annual July 27-31 in Santa Clara, Calif. Summit is where enterprises and service providers explore Lithium, learn how it–s being tested in production and get hands-on support for implementing their own Proofs-of-Concept. It includes over 80 tutorials, sessions and keynotes.

Today only: Get $150 off registration to OpenDaylight Summit with code in honor of the Lithium release. Code expires midnight P.D.T on June 29, 2015. For more information, visit .

Comments from AT&T
“As AT&T builds our global SDN controller using ODL components, we look forward to releases like Lithium with clustering and its improved features, important for our controller,” said Margaret Chiosi, distinguished network architect, AT&T. “Other features like Network Intent Composition and IoT protocols are also beneficial for the platform. We are pleased to see more OpenStack and ODL integration through Neutron and look to ODL to lead the industry in how SDN controllers can consistently interact with OpenStack.”

Comments from Brocade
“OpenDaylight has gained significant market traction from some of the most demanding users over the last two years. Brocade has been pleased to contribute to the OpenDaylight initiative from the very beginning, by supporting and growing the developer community, contributing to the maturity and robustness of the code, and helping provide carrier-class commercial options to speed adoption of open source SDN,” said Kelly Herrell, senior vice president and general manager, Software Networking, Brocade. “The OpenDaylight Lithium release is the next step in meeting the needs of large data centers and carrier operators alike as they transition to the New IP with software-based networks.”

Comments from Ciena
“Ciena Agility is pleased to be a part of the evolving open source community of OpenDaylight. The Lithium release will further assist customers in their migration to SDN with the powerful offering of additional reliability and network control capabilities. We are looking forward to continuing to accelerate engagement with the open source community,” said Kevin Sheehan, VP GM, Ciena Agility.

Comments from Cisco
“As OpenDaylight matures with new users, new contributors and new companies expanding to utilize the project, we see it becoming a cornerstone whole-stack environment,” said Dave Ward, CTO & Chief Architect, Cisco Systems. “This enables SDN and NFV to be baked-in for complete solutions. By providing the features required for cloud data center providers, such as Group Based Policy, Service Function Chaining, more integration APIs, OpenDaylight is now the most advanced open source controller in the industry and by far the best choice for users looking to enable SDN and NFV in their networks.”

Comments from ClearPath Networks
“The Lithium release represents a significant step forward for OpenDaylight, which is continuing to evolve into the open SDN platform that will propel adoption of Open SDN,” said Marc Cohn, senior vice president at ClearPath Networks and the sole Silver Member representative on the OpenDaylight Board of Directors. “Introduction of the intent-based framework, and more robust integration with OpenStack enhances our ability to leverage the potential for SDN and NFV to enable operators to deliver personalized, cost-effective managed services and vE/VCPE for SMB, enterprise, and consumer-based services.”

Comments from Dell
“OpenDaylight provides the open source tools to enable disaggregated, open networking which is aligned with Dell–s vision for the future,” said Subi Krishnamurthy, CTO, Dell Networking. “The community has made tremendous strides on stability, scalability, security and performance in the Lithium release.”

Comments from HP
“We see OpenDaylight as a powerful platform for carrier-grade SDN solutions, which is getting more feature-rich with every release,” said Sarwar Raza, vice president, NFV Product Management, HP and board member, OpenDaylight Project. “ConteXtream, now an HP Company, has been active in the OpenDaylight community since its inception and has made significant contributions to Service Function Chaining, an important capability for NFV. We look forward to our continued involvement in the OpenDaylight project to help enable widespread adoption of SDN and create a solid foundation for NFV.”

Comments from Huawei
“As more companies adopt IoT, the future enterprise will see an exponential growth in network activity and demand from various devices and sensors communicating over many different protocols across wide area networks,” said Helen Chen, principal engineer, Huawei Technologies. “With security and scalability becoming more critical, Huawei and the OpenDaylight community are delighted to see significant improvements in these areas in the OpenDaylight Lithium release.”

Comments from Infinera
“Infinera is pleased to be part of the OpenDaylight project and support the Lithium release,” said Stu Elby, senior vice president, Cloud network strategy and technology at Infinera. “As a pioneer in delivering real-world Transport SDN solutions, and a strong proponent of open-source multi-vendor SDN, we believe OpenDaylight is a highly valuable, carrier-grade platform for SDN development. Lithium demonstrates that OpenDaylight continues to mature, to deliver valuable new capabilities and to build momentum among users.”

Comments from Inocybe
“At Inocybe Technologies, the Pure Play OpenDaylight company, we help vendors, integrators and service providers leverage OpenDaylight as part of their products and services,” said Mathieu Lemay, chief executive officer, Inocybe Technologies. “The Lithium release is a significant milestone that will make it possible to solve real world network problems in production environments. The OpenDaylight platform provides the Swiss Army Knife required to address today–s networking challenges and pioneer tomorrow–s networking solutions.”

Comments from Intracom Telecom
“After performing rigorous stress tests on the Lithium release, we produced a comparative report to Helium () that shows notable improvements in OpenDaylight–s DataStore, exhibiting significant throughput and sustained throughput performance gains,” said Spyros Sakellariou, Content Delivery & VAS Section Manager, Intracom Telecom. “The enhanced performance and stability of Lithium release makes OpenDaylight capable to handle some of the most demanding requirements from our customers.”

Comments from NEC
“NEC supports OpenDaylight–s progress in extending functionality to include NFV use cases, as demonstrated with the new Lithium release,” said Terry Nakajima, Senior Director, Enterprise SDN Business, NEC Corporation. “NEC is a long-time leader and pioneer in SDN, and we continue to embrace using open source for new, innovative solutions to address today–s network challenges.”

Comments from Red Hat
“The continued growth of OpenDaylight as both a community and a technology, characterized by today–s release of Lithium, shows that not only is there interest in open source solutions for software-defined networking on the vendor side but also demand from end users,” said Chris Wright, chief technologist, Red Hat. “Open source powers innovation across the technology spectrum, and networking is no different — Red Hat is very pleased to continue to support OpenDaylight, highlighted by our contributions to the Lithium release as part of the wider OpenDaylight community.”

Comments from Qosmos
“Qosmos– vision is that future networks will be built on components and open source frameworks,” said Jerome Tollet, CTO at Qosmos. “OpenDaylight plays a key role in evolving network architectures, and I am particularly pleased with the integration of new capabilities such as service function chaining in OpenDaylight Lithium.”

The OpenDaylight Project is a collaborative open source project that aims to accelerate adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) for a more transparent approach that fosters new innovation and reduces risk. Founded by industry leaders and open to all, the OpenDaylight community is developing a common, open SDN framework consisting of code and blueprints. Get involved: .

OpenDaylight is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.

Jill Lovato
OpenDaylight Project

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