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ONOS Cardinal adds IPv6, MPLS

Switch control more multi-vendor

The Open Network Operating System (ONOS) has okayed its latest version, Cardinal, for general release.

Top of the list in the latest release, the community says, are enhancements to its Application Intent Framework. This gets MPLS and tunnelling support, which Sheryl Zhang, ON.Labs' chief of strategy and partnerships, said were high on the service provider request list, along with IPv6 support.

The intent framework also has a new high-availability extension to sense and work around device failures.

Down in the core, Cardinal claims big strides in its ability to handle multivendor OpenFlow builds at the switching layer.

“How we can encourage multi-vendor deployment is a major challenge,” Zhang told The Register's networking desk, because each vendor – and sometimes different devices within a vendor's portfolio – has different ways to store packet forwarding information.

The “flow objective” subsystem in Cadinal takes high-level forwarding decisions, she explained: “the subsystem takes that information, and works with the driver underneath it, to translate that to a specific language for a specific device.”

As long as the switches support OpenFlow 1.3, apps can get their network “without being concerned about specific device details”, Zhang added.

Southbound of the network operating system, Cardinal has added Netconf and PCEP interfaces.

The group also claims a 25 per cent performance boost in flow operations, application intent, and topology maintenance in Cardinal.

There's also to be a bunch of proof-of-concept demonstrations coming at the Open Networking Summit 2015 from June 14 in Silicon Valley. ®

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