“AT&T made kind of a big deal in July about working with the Linux Foundation to create an open source group around its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy (ECOMP) platform. But the Linux Foundation has not yet announced ECOMP as an official project.
Perhaps there’s a snag due to the fact that ECOMP includes software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) management and network orchestration (MANO) code. And the Linux Foundation already hosts Open-O, which also works on MANO.”
Linda Hardesty on SDxCentral.
As you’ve seen from recent posts, ECOMP has been making news after AT&T announced making its comprehensive SDN/NFV/MANO code base available as an open source project. This was followed with news that Orange has already started testing ECOMP. The article from Linda Hardesty provides a number of fascinating insights into the dilemmas that ECOMP introduces.
She asks, “So how will AT&T deal with this first hurdle? The 130-year-old carrier usually does things its own way, with a bevy of vendors fawning after it. But it says it wants to open source ECOMP, and that means working with a community. It’s yet to be seen if AT&T will somehow integrate Open-O’s code or proceed with its own flavor of MANO.
Also, both ECOMP and Open-O encompass more than MANO. So it gets complicated to consider how they might work together or in parallel. AT&T breaks ECOMP into eight software subsystems. And Open-O does orchestration not just for NFV, but also for SDN (SDN-O) and for global services (GS-O).
When asked about ECOMP, Marc Cohn, the Linux Foundation director for Open-O, stressed that ECOMP is not yet a Linux Foundation Project. “Linux is just advising AT&T, and that’s the fact,” he says. “When AT&T makes a decision it’s certainly going to affect Open-O. But no matter what they decide, Open-O is a standalone [group].””
Linda then states, “ECOMP is homegrown code written for U.S.-based AT&T. Open-O’s premier members include China Mobile, China Telecom, Huawei, and ZTE. And China Mobile is the world’s largest mobile phone service provider. Together, China Mobile and China Telecom count over 1 billion subscribers. This dwarfs AT&T Mobility’s 131 million subscribers.”