Two influential groups in the nascent carrier SDN (software defined networking) movement have joined forces. ETSI, the European standards body which is spearheading the NFV platform for telco network virtualization, has signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which drives SDN solutions for service providers, based on the OpenFlow open specification. The new partners said they will explore how SDN can “enable forwarding plane support for some of the most important NFV use cases’, bringing the two separate but related approaches closer together. The technologies are often presented as being independent of one another, and indeed, some carriers will implement aspects of SDN without adopting NFV. However, as Dan Pitt, executive director of the…