Cisco, SK Telecom jump aboard ON.Lab's SDN initiative

Cisco and SK Telecom are the latest companies to take part in the Open Networking Lab's initiative to develop an open operating system for service providers employing software-defined networking (SDN).

The two companies join an already star-studded set of Tier 1 vendors and telcos, including AT&T (NYSE: T), Ciena, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC), Intel and Huawei.

ON.Lab is creating the open-source Network Operating System (ONOS) for SDN, a carrier grade network operating system (OS) that it says can offer service providers high availability, scalability and high performance.

Since launching the open source release of ONOS in December, ON.Labs said that the operating system has been downloaded worldwide more than 1,000 times.

"The successful launch of ONOS marks an important milestone in the ongoing transformation of the network infrastructure with SDN," ON.Lab Executive Director Guru Parulkar said in a statement, according to an eWeek report. "Adding Cisco and SK Telecom as contributing partners significantly strengthens the ONOS community and drives our ongoing mission to bring openness and innovation to the Internet and Cloud for the public good." 

While ONOS is the latest SDN-related effort, it is not the only group. ONOS complements the work of other consortiums such as the OpenDaylight Project and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which are also developing open SDN platforms that service providers can leverage for their networks.

ON.Lab said what sets it apart from OpenDaylight Project and the ONF is that ONOS can help enable companies use the network infrastructures they've already deployed to make a migration to an SDN framework.

For more:
- eWeek has this article
- FierceWirelessTech has this article

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