A group of service providers and solution vendors such as Telefónica, RIFT.io, Mirantis, Intel, and Canonical has founded the Open Source MANO group, a community focused on delivering Open Source Management and Orchestration (MANO) aligned with ETSI NFV Information Models.

The initial project will integrate Telefónica’s OpenMANO software with RIFT.io’s Canonical’s Juju-generic VNF Manager, and the Rift.io orchestrator. According to SDX Central, “The initial OSM code base is already capable of orchestrating complex NFV use cases, using vendor-neutral information models capable of capturing all the significant features of an end-to-end service and the requirements of the individual virtual network functions (VNFs).”

“OpenStack has been a key enabler for radical transformation in the telecom industry, but there is still important work to be done in bridging the OSM and OpenStack communities and projects,” said Boris Renski, CMO, Mirantis. “Mirantis pioneered a popular NFV orchestration project in OpenStack (Murano), which today is used and co-engineered by carriers and telecom vendors such as AT&T, Saudi Telecom, Comcast, Telefónica, Cisco, Huawei, and countless others. The formation of OSM will unite us in driving projects like Murano forward.”

Mirantis will contribute Murano application catalog models along with open source software which is currently used in production NFV deployments to help accelerate OSM’s Resource and Service Orchestrators. Mirantis, one of the Openstack Foundation Board members, is working on creating a liaison between ETSI’s OSM and Openstack’s Murano Project.

OSM supports Resource Orchestration (RO) and Service Orchestration (SO), which Mirantis will augment with Fuel, an OpenStack project sparked by Mirantis, the de-facto installer for OPNFV and one of two default installers for Openstack.

The philosophy of the OPNFV project is to use existing projects rather than creating software from scratch, so it’s possible that OSM will eventually be incorporated as the MANO component of OPNFV.

The NFV management and organization (MANO) space has been rather crowded of late, with ETSI convening a meeting of no less than four carrier-instigated open source initiatives: OpenMANO (Telefónica), Open O (China Mobile), TCS Telco Cloud (Tata), and Gohan (NTT). The standards group is trying to prevent fragmentation in the space by ensuring that the groups coordinate.

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