The Open Networking Foundation has released the second version of Atrium, an open SDN software distribution, extending it to the OpenDaylight platform.
Atrium 2015/A, which was released by the organization last June, is a vertically integrated set of open source components that together form a complete SDN stack. It is designed to facilitate the networking industry's adoption of open SDN by integrating established open source SDN software with some key connecting pieces.
One of the key focuses of the second release of Atrium is incorporating OpenDaylight into the Atrium router.
In this release, the router is built on the OpenDaylight framework and controls OpenFlow hardware switches using Quagga's open-source implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a control plane protocol for Internet routing.
A major feature of the first release of Atrium, particularly flow objectives and device drivers, are implemented in the OpenDaylight Device Identification and Driver Module (DIDM) that allows the router to work across multiple different OpenFlow v1.3 hardware pipelines. Criterion Networks and Wipro made the largest contributions to this work. Hardware from NoviFlow interoperates with the OpenDaylight implementation of Atrium, with additional vendors to follow.
Following interoperability demonstrations and testing in AsiaPac, Europe, and North America, this release of Atrium also improves the ONOS version (Atrium 2015/A) by improving scalability and stability and by adding experimental support for the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP). Performance and scale test contributors include Criterion Networks and improvements to the basic router have come from ON.Lab.
Another feature of Atrium is a new feature called the Leaf-Spine Fabric. ONF said this is the first Layer 2/3 Clos network fabric built in open source, on Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware, and with SDN principles and notable contributions from ON.Lab, Broadcom, and Accton.
The Atrium fabric is designed to scale up to 16 racks, using well-established design principles of Layer 3 down to the Top of Rack (ToR) switch, where packets from Layer 2 are switched within a rack and Layer 3 routed across racks. A major service provider plans to conduct a field trial of the fabric as part of the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD) project with ON.Lab.
For more:
- see the release
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