New Intel Network Builders Fast Track Igniting Network Transformation with the Intel ONP Reference Architecture

Today at IDF 2015, Sandra Rivera, Vice President and GM of Intel’s Network Platforms Group, disclosed the Intel® Network Builders Fast Track program in her joint keynote “5G: Innovation from Client to Cloud.”  The mission of the program is to accelerate and broaden the availability of proven commercial solutions through a key combination of means such as equity investments, blueprint publications, performance optimizations, and multi-party interoperability testing via 3rd party labs.

This program was specifically designed to help address many of the biggest challenges that the industry faces today with one goal in mind - accelerate the network transformation to software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).

Thanks to the new Intel Network Builders Fast Track, Intel® Open Network Platform (ONP) is poised to have an even bigger impact in how we collaborate with end-users and supply chain partners to deliver proven SDN and NFV solutions together.

Intel ONP is a reference architecture that combines leading open source software and standards ingredients together on a quarterly release that can be used by developers to create optimized commercial solutions for SDN and NFV workloads and use cases.

Whereas the Intel Network Builders Fast Track combines market development activities, technical enabling, and equity investments to accelerate time to market (TTM) for Intel Network Builder partners, the Intel ONP then amplifies this with a reference architecture. With Intel ONP, partners can get to market more quickly with solutions based on open industry leading building blocks that are optimized for industry-leading performance on Intel Xeon® processor-based servers.

Intel ONP Release 1.4 includes the following software for example:

• OpenStack* Kilo 2015.1 release with the following key feature enhancements:
  • Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA) capabilities
  • Improved CPU pinning to virtual machines
  • I/O based Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) aware scheduling
• OpenDaylight* Helium-SR3
• Open vSwitch* 2.3.90
• Data Plane Development Kit release 1.8
• Fedora* 21 release
• Real-Time Linux* Kernel, patches release 3.14.36-rt34

We’ll be releasing ONP 1.5 in mid September. However there’s even more exciting news just beyond release 1.5.

Strategically aligned with OPNFV for Telecom

As previously announced this week at IDF, the Intel ONP 2.0 reference architecture scheduled for early next year will adopt and be fully aligned with the OPNFV Arno• software components released in June this year.  With well over 50 members, OPNFV is an industry leading open source community committed to collaborating on a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new NFV solutions.  Intel is a platinum member of OPNFV dedicated to partnering within the community to solve real challenges in key barriers to adoption such as packet processing performance, service function chaining, service assurance, security, and high availability just to name some.  Intel ONP 2.0 will also deliver support for new products such as the Intel® Xeon® Processor D, our latest SOC as well as showcase new workloads such as Gi-LAN.  This marks a major milestone for Intel to align ONP with OPNFV architecturally and to contribute to the OPNFV program on a whole new level.

The impact of the Network Builders Fast Track will be significant. The combination of the Intel Network Builder Fast Track and the Intel ONP reference architecture will mean even faster time to market, a broader range of industry interoperability, and market-leading commercial solutions to fuel SDN and NFV growth in the marketplace.

Whether you are a service provider or enterprise looking to deploy a new SDN solution, or a partner in the supply chain developing the next generation solution for NFV, I encourage you to join us on this journey with both Intel Network Builder Fast Track and Intel ONP as we transform the network together.