NFV management and network orchestration (MANO) is sure to be a hot topic at next week’s SDN & OpenFlow World Congress at The Hague, Netherlands. For many, MANO has been considered to be a roadblock to not only deploying network functions virtualization (NFV), but also to making NFV agile and efficient.

ETSI’s Open Source MANO (OSM) group’s announcement earlier this week of its first code release, called Release ONE, is a critical step leading up to the Congress. ETSI says that OSM can natively support virtual infrastructure managers (VIMs) from VMware and OpenStack and can also support various software-defined networking (SDN) controllers.

Grant Lenahan, partner and principal analyst with Appledore Research Group, is chairing a panel on MANO at the conference and says that his panelists will be talking about the evolution of MANO and where it currently stands. “The real question is: Where do we stand in the migration? What is being done in open source vs. proprietary solutions? And how do we close the gap?” Lenahan asked.

David Snow, principal analyst of service provider infrastructure at Current Analysis, says NFV MANO has been a roadblock for some time and that operators are concerned about it because the quality of the MANO system will determine how agile and efficient an operator’s network will be. “You do have to have good MANO,” he said in a Current Analysis webinar preview of the SDN World Congress.

Snow said that SDN World Congress attendees will likely be talking about open source MANO projects like OSM, the Linux Foundation’s Open-O, AT&T's ECOMP, and which projects companies should align with, as well as multivendor virtual network function (VNF) onboarding and orchestration. Both Snow and Lenahan said that overwhelmingly, they hear operators talk about the need for multivendor solutions over proprietary MANO solutions. “Carriers are scared of being locked into one vendor,” Lenahan said.