LOS ANGELES —  AT&T is open-sourcing its disaggregated network operating system (dNOS), and the Linux Foundation has agreed to host the project and (thankfully) change the name to DANOS.

DANOS is the operating system for individual white boxes that make up a network.

As part of the Linux Foundation, the DANOS project will incorporate contributions from complementary open source communities to build a standardized distributed network operating system. Some of the open source projects that will initially collaborate with DANOS include the Free Range Routing (FRR) project, the OpenSwitch (OPX) project, the Open Networking Foundation’s Stratum project, and Microsoft’s Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC).

In addition, Broadcom said its software development kit for switch configuration (SDKLT), which it open-sourced earlier this year, will work with DANOS. Metaswitch said its routing and control plane protocols will install and operate as binary applications on top of DANOS. And Silicom said DANOS will enable its edge networking devices to be truly open and programmable.

DANOS code and collateral transitions are underway, and a first code release is expected the second half of 2018.

At today’s Open Networking Summit (ONS) in Los Angeles, Andre Fuetsch, CTO and president of AT&T Labs, said the company’s network transformation is more critical than ever, given the continued growth of traffic and its roll out of 5G. “We are pushing our networks, seeing roughly 200 petabytes of data across our wireless network on a given day," said Fuetsch. "We’ve seen almost a 50 percent increase in just 12 months. We don’t see any end in sight at least in the near term.”

In addition to the ongoing increase in network traffic, the carrier has committed to roll out 5G in 12 markets in 2018. And as part of that, earlier this week AT&T said that it plans to deploy over 60,000 white box routers in its macro network. The routers will be an open hardware design.

“As important as the hardware is, the software is the future of our network,” said Fuetsch. “We need an open and collaborative model. On these white box machines we are going to be running DANOS. We think DANOS is going to be revolutionary for service providers at all scales to adopt.”

Chris Rice, senior vice president of AT&T Labs, Domain 2.0 Architecture, told SDxCentral in December 2017 that the company developed the software because it needed a network operating system that was consistent for all the white boxes it was planning to deploy in its network.

Andre Fuetsch, CTO and president of AT&T Labs, speaks at the Open Networking Summit in Los Angeles.