The Linux Foundation announced Tuesday that Platform for Network Data Analytics (PNDA) is now a Linux Foundation Project. PNDA provides an open source, scalable platform for next-generation network analytics. The project has also announced the availability of its initial platform release, with early supporters such as Cisco, Deepfield, FRINX, Intersec, Moogsoft, NGENA, Ontology, OpenDataSoft and Tupl.
PNDA aims to eliminate complexity by integrating, scaling and managing a set of open data processing technologies and provides an end-to-end platform for deploying analytics applications and services. The design of PNDA is based on next-generation, big data architecture patterns. It supports batch and real-time streaming data exploration and analysis, at the scale of millions of messages per second.
Cisco is contributing code to enable end-to-end platform provisioning and management, application packaging, and deployment. The initial release of PNDA is fully functional and available for download as a production-ready solution on OpenStack-based platforms. Support for bare-metal and public-cloud provisioning is expected later this year.
Future contributions from the open source community are expected to extend and innovate upon PNDA’s capabilities, including Hadoop distribution independence, platform infrastructure validation, container support, additional data publishers, and deep-learning framework integration, among others.
PNDA also complements major open source software defined networking, network functions virtualization, and network orchestration efforts such as OpenDaylight, Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), and FD.io. There is also synergy with the Open Data Platform initiative (ODPi), which defines a common runtime specification, reference implementation and test suite for Hadoop-based distributions, including PNDA.
“There have been significant efforts across the industry in NFV, automation, orchestration and control which have made real-time network service provisioning possible,” said David Ward, SVP, Chief Architect & CTO, Cisco. “Open source software implementations supporting this space are also maturing as shown by OpenStack and OpenDaylight. In comparison, industry efforts to enable the monitoring and analysis of the data produced by these services have been lagging behind.”
‘We believe that the solution is to leverage the rapid innovation in big data analytics; that’s the reason for being for PNDA — an open source big data platform that can foster an ecosystem of innovative analytics applications while also supporting the next generation of reactive network services,” Ward added.
“At Deepfield, we have experienced a rapid adoption of our big data analytics platform to replace siloed solutions such as traffic engineering, service assurance, network forensics, and DDOS,” said Jeff Bazar, Chief Strategy Officer, Deepfield. “Our customers have recognized that big data analytics is not just for replacing legacy solutions, but also it is required to enable next generation OSS/BSS, orchestration, control, automation and NFV deployments. Recognizing the importance of this technology, Cisco has made a valuable open source contribution, namely PNDA, to help build the ecosystem and accelerate the development of new big data applications.”
“PNDA combines big data architecture, tools and techniques to deliver network information at virtually unlimited scale to operators and customers alike,” said Tomas Olvecky, Technical Leader, FRINX. “FRINX believes PNDA is the logical next step that allows network operators to close the loop between acquiring data from the network, running analytics to mine high value information and finally feeding policy back into the network to optimize for customer experience and cost.”
“We believe PNDA will boost the ecosystem for network analytics, creating the conditions for open platforms on which external applications will be higher performance and easier to deploy,” said Jean-Marc Coïc, CTO & Co-Founder, Intersec. “Thanks to its efficient API, PNDA opens the way for analytics applications based on location data, within an NFV architecture. Intersec’s extensive experience in big data analytics induces us to promote this type of initiative, and we’re glad to join this project and provide full compatibility with the framework.”
“Almost every company we talk to, whether service provider or digital enterprise, has a strategy and plan to use open source toolkits for aggregation, data warehousing, and big data analytics. All of these companies are duplicating the same effort, experiencing and repeating the same learning processes, and delivering similar resulting solutions,” said Mike Silvey, Executive Vice President, Moogsoft. “The PNDA initiative offers a packaged approach, using the best of breed open source technologies that everyone is already committed to, helping short circuit the process to value and reducing the resource effort involved in architecture, implementation and support. For Moogsoft and our peers in the service assurance community, PNDA offers a single point of data that we can subscribe to, reducing our time to demonstrate value and reducing our need to instrument custom integrations. PNDA is a win-win for both vendor and end-user communities.”