ONOS Announces Development of Open CORD Reference Implementation

SANTA CLARA, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 03/14/16 --  Open Networking Summit (ONS) --  ONOS' Project today announced major growth for the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD) and development of a new open reference implementation. Buoyed by rapid market adoption, new use cases for CORD will be on display at ONS this week.

CORD will provide economies of scale and agility of cloud computing to the service provider central office by leveraging infrastructure constructed from commodity building blocks. CORD began as a use case of ONOS and leverages three related technologies: SDN, NFV, and cloud. The open reference implementation builds on merchant silicon, white boxes and open-source platforms such as ONOS, OpenStack, and XOS, providing building blocks for service providers to create innovative services for their residential, mobile and enterprise customers.

CORD also emphasizes scalability, high performance, high availability and ease of use that service providers require. Many service providers and a diverse group of vendors plan to use CORD reference implementation to do experimentation, trials, and use those learnings to influence production deployments for residential, mobile, and enterprise markets. 

"CORD is in a very unique and advantageous position," said Guru Parulkar, executive director at ON.Lab. "It has evolved at record speed from a use case of ONOS to a very important systems platform that service providers can use for multiple domains of use. The list of companies now participating, contributing, using and interested in CORD is already very long and impressive."

New Reference Implementation for Network Operators
An open reference implementation of CORD built from servers and white-box switches defines a general and extensible platform. Both complete enough for field trials and general enough for multiple domains, the new reference implementation will deliver:

• Hardware: A list of commodity compute and switching components, plus assembly instructions and test procedures for building a CORD POD.
• Software: A software distribution that implements the CORD platform, along with example software services for residential, mobile and enterprise domains of use.

CORD Use Cases Showcased at ONS
Enterprise (E-CORD) - Extends CORD with enterprise services and enables service providers to offer SDN-WAN, as well as MEF carrier Ethernet services. That is the ability to create multi-site virtual networks on demand with customer-specified services such as intrusion detection, WAN acceleration, and others. E-CORD POC will be demonstrated at ONS.

Mobile (M-CORD) - Integrates disaggregated and virtualized RAN, disaggregated and virtualized EPC, and mobile edge computing with CORD and helps service providers and vendors move closer to realizing 5G. M-CORD POC will be demonstrated at ONS.

Residential (R-CORD) - Combines vCPE and virtualized wireline access technologies (e.g., GPON, 10GPON, G.Fast) with cloud-based subscriber services (e.g., parental control, video delivery). R-CORD will be demonstrated at ONS. 

Diverse Set of Companies Back CORD
A diverse range of companies are actively contributing to and advancing CORD, including:

• Service provider partners: AT&T, China Unicom, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, Verizon
• Vendor partners: Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, NEC, Nokia
• Collaborators: Accton, AirHop, Broadcom, Cavium, Celestica, Ciena, Cobham, Flextronics, NetCracker, PMC Sierra, Radisys.

Support for CORD
"AT&T supports the goals and achievements that are embodied in CORD," said Andre Fuetsch, senior vice president of Architecture and Design at AT&T. "The work is pushing the boundaries of many technologies and architectures, as well as open source and open spec hardware. We are learning from the CORD experiments and trials and using this knowledge to refine AT&T's Integrated Cloud. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with ON.Lab and others in advancing NFV and SDN technology."

"Equinix, as it works with partners and customers to drive innovation and interconnection, will be enabling OCP hardware and open source software across our global network of datacenters," said Ihab Tarazi, chief technology officer at Equinix. "In this regard, Equinix plans to collaborate with the CORD project and deploy the CORD software stack on OCP hardware."

"CORD is a promising project that will influence NTT Com's SDN development strategies greatly," said Tatsuya Yamashita, senior vice president, head of Technology Development at NTT Communications. "We expect CORD to be a truly open source and whitebox based SDN solution that is used in many use cases and will actively contribute to a success of this project."

 "SK Telecom is keen on developing a network with open hardware and software technology such as CORD," said Dr. Kang-Won Lee, senior vice president at SK Telecom. "We are particularly interested in bringing innovations to the mobile part of the network. Our first proof of concept is the Mobile-CORD project that we worked together with AT&T and other vendors."

"We find CORD a very promising service delivery platform built using commodity hardware and open source software," said Dr. Tang Xiongyan, chief technologist at China Unicom and ONOS board member. "We are interested in deploying E-CORD to offer our enterprise customers services, such as networks on demand with the the ability to observe, control, and program the network. We look forward to open collaboration to push CORD forward to trials and deployments."

"As we implement our network virtualization plan, we look forward to the potential CORD holds to drive the economies and agility needed to build a next-generation network that meets the communication needs of the 21st century," said Brian Higgins, vice president, Network Planning, Verizon. "We salute the CORD project as an admirable example of the value of the open source community and the speed at which important contributions can be made."

More about the CORD Mini Summit
The CORD Mini Summit at ONS will feature an introduction of the open reference implementation from CORD community experts from ON.Lab, ONF, AT&T, China Unicom, SK Telecom, Verizon, Akamai, UC Berkeley, Ciena, Cavium, Radisys, NetCracker and Ericsson. Talks will cover the CORD architecture, along with CORD services developed for residential, enterprise, and mobile domains. There is also an informal coffee break planned for networking and dialogue with CORD community members. Click here for the full CORD Mini Summit agenda and speaker line-up.

About the ONOS project
ONOS is the open source SDN networking operating system for Service Provider networks architected for high performance, scale and availability. The ONOS ecosystem comprises ON.Lab and organizations that are funding and contributing to the ONOS initiative. These include AT&T, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, China Unicom, Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, NEC and Nokia. See the full list of members, including ONOS' collaborators, and learn how you can get involved with ONOS at onosproject.org.

ONOS is an independently funded software project at The Linux Foundation that harnesses the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. linuxfoundation.org

   
    Press Contact
    Meredith SolbergPR Manager at The Linux [email protected] & ONOS ContactBill Snow Vice President of Engineering at [email protected]

Source: ONOS

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