China Mobile joins OpenDaylight Project

The OpenDaylight Project, an open source platform for programmable, software-defined networks, has announced that China Mobile has joined the project at the Silver Level.

China Mobile joins Tencent and Alibaba, also members of OpenDaylight, as part of a growing number of Chinese internet players and telecoms operators that actively participate in open networking projects and leverage open source SDN to support their extreme scalability demands.

The operator wants to standardize and also customize their environments to improve automation. OpenDaylight provides a means for China Mobile to build on well-tested, foundational capabilities, which would otherwise take far too long for them to develop entirely in-house, said Wang Jinzhu, project manager of China Mobile Research Institute.

Recently, China Mobile released its commercial OpenDaylight-based data center SDN controller named “AERO,” currently in trial.

Additionally, China Mobile has also initiated the “SPTN” project within OpenDaylight, which evolves the packet transport network (PTN) toward SDN.

As early adopters of OpenDaylight, China Mobile is leveraging the platform with OpenStack to deploy enterprise service offerings under its NovoDC program, which offers both a telecom infrastructure as well as virtual public or private cloud services.

NovoDC has helped China Mobile to gain significant data center opex savings and can now deliver new services in minutes rather than weeks.

The OpenDaylight Project meanwhile also announced the launch of its “Powered by ODL” program, which signals high technical standards and quality expectations for commercial products or services based on the platform.

With increasing numbers of solution providers incorporating OpenDaylight code into downstream commercial offerings, the program is created to help end users identify quality OpenDaylight-based solutions while supporting vendors with their go-to-market strategies.

Any individual or organization offering an OpenDaylight-based product or service may apply for the trademark. Products that are “Powered by OpenDaylight” must include specific core components from a recent release of the OpenDaylight code base, as approved by the OpenDaylight’s board of directors.