The new Open Source MANO (OSM) group hosted at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) met for the first time earlier this year and set an ambitious schedule to publish its first release within the next two months and subsequent new releases every six months.

Metaswitch is one of the first founding members of ETSI OSM. And one of Metaswitch’s VNFs, Clearwater virtual IMS, was selected to show the project’s capabilities in its first proof-of-concept demo, which was shown at Mobile World Congress. The demo is important for many reasons, one of which is that the initial OSM code from it provides the foundation for the OSM project, as explained in a white paper written by the founding members.

For a good explanation of the MWC demo, the OSM group has produced an informative video that walks through how it all worked. Another video from the OSM group goes into more detail about the infrastructure and software that was used to create the resource and service orchestration.

The overall scope of the OSM project covers both resource and service orchestration, “and it will enable the automated deployment and interconnection of all components for the lead NFV network scenarios as well as network service lifecycle management,” according the OSM white paper.

As Metaswitch CTO Martin Taylor explained in the white paper, “Data-driven automated deployment and life-cycle management of complex VNFs is essential to realizing the full potential of NFV, but it’s a complex and challenging problem to solve. In our view, the best way to approach this problem is to share the combined perspectives and expertise of a wide range of players in the NFV ecosystem, including network operators and vendors in the infrastructure, operations support and VNF spaces. This is what the Open Source MANO project is setting out to do, and as a result, it’s making a really valuable contribution to the state of the art in the MANO.”