AT&T ECOMP SDN platform move to open source community

Moving on previously announced plans, the #AT&T #ECOMP #SDN platform will allow for open source development enhancements AT&T said it was moving on previously announced plans to migrate its enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy platform to the open source community. The telecom giant said the platform, which controls its move into the software-defined networking space, is now open to developers interested in building upon the already established software code. AT&T said it was working with the #LinuxFoundation on the structure of the open source release. “This is a big decision and getting it right is crucial,” said John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president for technology and operations at AT&T. “We want to build a community – where people contribute to the code base and advance the platform. And, we want this to help align the global industry. We’ve engaged a third-party company to be the integrator and provide support in the industry for the ECOMP platform. And we’ve received positive feedback from major global telecom companies.” In touting the platform, AT&T said ECOMP is “mature, feature-complete and tested in real-world deployments. And, we believe it will mature SDN and become the industry standard. Releasing this software into open source levels the worldwide playing field for everyone. Most importantly, we believe this will rapidly accelerate innovation across the cloud and networking ecosystems.” AT&T unveiled the ECOMP initiative earlier this year, which it said was designed to automate network services and infrastructure running in a cloud environment. Donovan said the carrier had been working on ECOMP for nearly two years, tackling the project due to a lack of guidance for NFV and SDN deployments in a wide area network environment. ECOMP is said to provide automation support for service delivery, service assurance, performance management, fault management and SDN tasks. The platform is also designed to work with OpenStack, though Donovan noted it was extensible to other cloud and compute environments.

http://www.rcrwireless.com/20160713/software-defined-networking-sdn/att-ecomp-sdn-platform-move-open-source-community-tag2

AT&T: Three-quarters of our network is going virtual, and we're open-sourcing the tools

#AT&T says it will open source the software it is using for an in-house network virtualization push.

The US telecom giant said that the #ECOMP (enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy) software-defined networking ( #SDN ) software will be the basis of a push to virtualize 75 per cent of the AT&T network by the year 2020. That software will be released as open source and will work with the #OpenStack architecture.

AT&T said that ECOMP is the software it is using as part of an effort to shift its network hardware from specialized hardware appliances to virtual machines hosted on off-the-shelf hardware. In the process, AT&T says it will be able to provide greater capacity and flexibility than its previous network, which was constructed largely to handle voice traffic.

The ECOMP package includes SDN and WAN optimization tools, as well as VM and cloud service management (including software to allocate hardware for VMs) and security and management frameworks.

"ECOMP is an infrastructure delivery platform and a scalable, comprehensive network cloud service," said AT&T chief strategy officer John Donovan.

"It provides automation of many service delivery, service assurance, performance management, fault management, and SDN tasks."

Seeking additional input on ECOMP, AT&T says it will make the software available as open source and has already posted a whitepaper[PDF]. The telco hopes that, in addition to helping AT&T, open source contributions will also allow other network operators around the world to use ECOMP for their own SDNs, providing an inside track to interoperability with AT&T in the process.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/15/att_network_virtual/