Internet2 and the Open source SDN Network Operating System (ONOS) community, have recently announced that they have actively deployed ONOS on Internet2's nationwide research and education (R&E) network through its NOC at the Indiana University, connecting four other educational institutions, including Duke University, Florida International University, University of Maryland at College Park and the University of Utah.
Internet2 operates one of the largest and fastest R&E network in the U.S. at speeds of more than 100 Gbps and at 8.8 Tbps of capacity, built atop an SDN substrate. More than 200 major research universities and 100 countries connect to one another using advanced broadband connections over Internet2.
With the latest development, Internet2 is using the capabilities of its SDN substrate to provision virtual networks based on FlowSpace Firewall. An ONOS cluster is deployed in a virtual network slice on the Internet2 network, controlling 38 OpenFlow-enabled Brocade and Juniper switches. The SDN-IP Peering application deployed atop ONOS peers with other, traditional networks, said ONOS.
According to ONOS, an SDN-based network like Internet2 provides benefits such as network programmability, lower TCO and removal of vendor lock-in. In this particular case, the centralized control plane leads to significant improvements in network operations efficiency for the Internet2 network.
Rob Vietzke, vice president of network services at Internet2
We are pleased to partner with the ONOS project team to deploy this breakout software-defined capability for the first time on a nation-wide production network. This work is a notable contribution by the R&E community in the effort to explore new research ideas in the field of networking and create prototype services that will influence the next generation of the Internet.
Bill Snow, vice president of Engineering for ON.Lab
ON.Lab, the ONOS Project and Internet2 have a very synergistic collaboration. At ON.Lab we develop interesting open source SDN platforms and Internet2 is a keen early adopter bringing new capabilities to its customers. With the deployment of ONOS on Internet2's nationwide network, we get to validate and demonstrate ONOS's scalability, performance and high availability in a production setting and learn from this experience to make ONOS better.
