ETSI OSM is an industry-led ETSI community that is delivering a production-quality open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack aligned with ETSI NFV principles and specifications, and that targets to meet the requirements of operational NFV networks.
SliceNet recently joined the ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) research community, that group together a wide set of heterogeneous research activities using or contributing to ETSI OSM. SliceNet uses ETSI OSM as part of the Service and Slice orchestration framework for combined coordination of end-to-end network slices and NFV Network Services provisioning and operation in support of the SmartCity, SmartGrid and eHealth vertical use cases.
As a full solution for NFV management and orchestration, ETSI OSM has to be considered as an extremely relevant opensource tool for NFV Network Services and VNF lifecycle management. It has been proved to be working in many interoperability deployments (including multiple infrastructure based on OpenStack and VMWare), being also deeply involved in the ETSI NFV Plugtests events where NFV solutions providers (from MANOs to VNFs and VIMs) meet together to test and integrate their products. In addition, the alignment of the ETSI OSM Northbound APIs to the standard ETSI NFV SOL005 REST APIs is a crucial feature for interoperability with enhanced OSS functionalities, like those provided by the SliceNet orchestration framework in the context of service and slice coordination.
All in all, OSM is currently attracting a lot of interest in the telco industry, from operators and vendors up to service providers. The ETSI OSM community is industry-driven and very wide, counting more than 130 institutions as members and participants. Moreover, being it ETSI driven, it has a native standard flavour and roadmap which can be leverage by SliceNet as well. Therefore, the choice of ETSI OSM as reference baseline for the SliceNet slice orchestration framework and VNF lifecycle management is a concrete opportunity and added value to (re)use a de-facto standard tool.