Yesterday AT&T T 17,13 +0,22 +1,30% handed over control of it’s ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy) engine to the Linux Foundation, moving the development of their VNF orchestrator into the Open Source community. The press announcement buries this within a whole pile of announcements regarding the AT&T Indigo network architecture.
8.5 million lines of code within the project are being “opened” by the Linux Foundation at the moment, and then will provide the infrastructure to support open development of this project in the near future.
Chris Rice, SVP at AT&T Labs, said ECOMP is divided into 11 modules, each of those modules able to fit within a virtual machine (with containers inside those VMs), and modules can be installed in an OpenStack cloud in 15 minutes.
The release of this amount of production ready code to support telco environments and assist in the BSS/OSS environment will have a very good effect, in that it will help standardise the deployment of APIs within the SDN network infrastructure.
Interestingly, Orange is one of the companies looking at directly being involved in ECOMP, for exactly that reason. Other organizations that have made a commitment to ECOMP include Amdocs, Bell Canada, Brocade, Ericsson, Huawei, IBM, Intel, and Metaswitch.
