Overture today announced upgrades to its Overture Ensemble architecture, including a new software defined networking (SDN) controller based on the work of the OpenDaylight Project (ODL).

Overture says Ensemble’s updates were driven by three years of collaboration with several service providers to help them extend the lives of physical network devices during the transition to more virtualization.

Overture Ensemble 2.0 includes a new version of its Ensemble Carrier Ethernet VNF, which has been renamed Overture Connector. The virtualization platform provides virtual switching, flow steering across diverse physical and virtual network systems, and Carrier Ethernet 2.0 functionality, which is hardware-agnostic.

Ensemble 2.0 also features the new Overture Controller, responsible for establishing and managing overlay networking configurations. It uses the ODL framework for the establishment and management of multicloud VNF service chains.

Asked why it built its own SDN controller, Overture told us in an email: “SDN controller applications can be unique to the networking requirements associated with the targeted use cases, and therefore, we are building a suite of SDN control applications that address these unique requirements."

Ensemble 2.0 also includes an update of its service orchestrator. The ETSI MANO-compliant NFV orchestrator handles VNF onboarding as well as network service design, deployment, and management.

In addition, Overture Analytics has the ability to correlate across many data sources, including:

  • Service data, which can come from VNFs themselves (e.g., packet load or Service OAM metrics), service assurance platforms (passive or active probes), or DPI platforms
  • Network data, which can come from physical network elements, network monitoring probes, or EMS/NMS platforms
  • Virtual infrastructure data — for example, CPU load data collected by OpenStack Ceilometer
  • VNF and service configuration data, such as network service configuration or VNF placement

Ensemble 2.0 also includes a new Overture Registrar, a centralized management framework for configuration, hardware, and application registration; authentication; access control; licensing management; and VNF inventory.