The open source group OPNFV almost hit its goal of making its second code release available in February. The new release announced today and dubbed Brahmaputra (after a river with headwaters in China) comes just 18 months after OPNFV was founded. The group issued its first code release Arno in June 2015.

Brahmaputra’s 165 developers pulled the latest code from upstream communities, including OpenContrail, ONOS, and ETSI. More than 30 accepted projects also contributed new capabilities and community resources.

Brahmaputra contains an increased number of components and scenarios, including support for additional software-defined networking (SDN) controllers and installers such as OpenStack Liberty and OpenDaylight Beryllium, which can be used to build the platform.

Hardened feature enhancements of Brahmaputra include:

  • Layer 3 VPN instantiation and configuration
  • Initial service function chaining capabilities via OpenDaylight Beryllium
  • Basic resource reservation via a shim layer on top of OpenStack
  • Enhancements in performance and throughput via data plane acceleration and network functions virtualization (NFV)-focused enhancements in OVS and KVM

The new release expands testing, adding system-level testing and multiple performance testing frameworks as well as detailed vSwitch performance characterization, bottoms-up system performance benchmarking, and the implementation of a performance bottleneck-focused testing framework.

Brahmaputra was validated in OPNFV’s Pharos test labs. The group now has 12 of these labs scattered around the globe, hosted by member companies.

OPNFV uses a Jenkins-based continuous integration/deployment toolchain, which the group says has been helpful in automating all integration and deployment scenarios and associated testing frameworks.

OPNFV is moving quickly to develop a full NFV reference architecture, but will it be quick enough?

It’s doing work similar to that of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which is working on its OpenNFV initiative. And last week at Mobile World Congress, both Cisco and EMC announced new NFV infrastructure offerings. Cisco introduced its NFV Infrastructure (NFVI), which it says provides all the necessary compute, storage, and networking infrastructure to run NFV network services. And EMC unveiled its Provider Cloud System (PCS) NFV reference architecture.