The CORD Project (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) is moving rapidly beyond the proof-of-concept and gaining support of major telcos and cloud providers such as AT&T, China Unicom, Google, Telefonica and Verizon, said Guru Parulkar, speaking at the inaugural CORD Summit, which was held 29-July-2016 at the Google campus in Silicon Valley. CORD, which originated at ON.Lab, is now managed under The Linux Foundation.
The sold-out CORD Summit attracted about 200 participants from a diverse array of companies, ranging from silicon providers, system vendors, software developers, cloud companies and global carriers.
Some highlights:
- CORD has just released its first open reference implementation built on SDN, NFV, Cloud and open source platforms such as ONOS, Trellis, OpenStack, Docker and XOS.
- CORD will leverage merchant silicon, white boxes servers, bare metal switches and open source software platforms.
- XOS is the Everything-as-a-Service paradigm featuring service composition, multi-tenant services, and services with scalability and high availability;
- ONOS is the SDN OS for service providers also developed at ON.Lab. It targets scalability, performance, high availability, abstractions for apps and devices
- Trellis is open source SDN fabric on bare metal, combined with virtual network overlay, unified control of underlay and overlay and many applications;
- CORD is not only servers/switches but also network access boxes, including FTTH, LTE, etc.
- the CORD project is divided into the following domains: Mobile, Residential, and Enterprise.
- CORD introduces an SDN-enabled central office fabric with multiple levels of resiliency.
- CORD is using OpenStack and Docker to support a micro-services approach
- Google’s Craig Barrett noted that his company has made considerable investments in SDN and NFV, and that it has huge network access project underway, such as Google Fiber in a growing number of U.S. cities, Wi-Fi/mobile access services, and even the futuristic Google Loon balloon Internet project. In India, Google’s project with RailTel is already delivering Internet service to train commuters using a Wi-Fi + subscriber management system running in a cloud, not a traditional central office.
- AT&T’s Al Blackburn spoke about this company’s commitment to open source projects, including CORD and its ECOMP
- Newly announced CORD collaborators include Broadband Forum, Lime Micro (open source Software Defined Radio products), NTT East, Quortus and Telefonica. The five new collaborator companies also joined the ONOS Project
- Last week, CORD announced Google, Radisys and Samsung Electronics Co. as new members. Original backers include AT&T, China Unicom, Google, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, and Verizon, vendors Ciena, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, NEC, Nokia, etc.
“The CORD community continues to quickly grow and attract a diverse range of collaborators eager to work with us,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director of ON.Lab and board member of the CORD Project. “We are united in our focus on developing and building CORD into a mainstream solution for service providers as quickly as possible. Besides our existing service provider partners, more than 20 active collaborators and many other global service providers have also expressed interest in wanting to use CORD.”