New Open Source CORD Project Offers First Open Reference Implementation For Service Providers’ Central Office/Access Network

Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) initiative radically transforms the economics of network access

Sunnyvale, Calif, July 29, 2016–The CORD™ Project, an open source project that delivers cloud economics and agility to the telco Central Office (CO), today announced availability of the first open CORD reference implementation, which provides a single integrated solutions platform for creating innovative new customer services.

With CORD, service providers, both fixed and wireless, will have the service delivery platform necessary to create and deploy new services at cloud-like speed, and independent of the access network architecture. To achieve this, CORD leverages merchant silicon, white boxes servers, bare metal switches and open source software platforms to offer today’s traditional connectivity services, as well as tomorrow’s cloud-based services, to residential, enterprise and mobile customers in a common unified infrastructure.

Hosted by The Linux Foundation, CORD’s community growth, technical roadmap, availability of the open reference implementation, the project’s focus moving forward, as well as how the global community can contribute and participate are being discussed today at the first CORD Summit, located at the Google Sunnyvale Tech Corner Campus in California. New partners, Google, Radisys and Samsung, were announced this week and will be in attendance.

The first open reference implementation of CORD builds on best-in-class software defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), Cloud and open source platforms such as ONOS®, Trellis, OpenStack, Docker and XOS.

“Our first open source distribution is much more than a pile of code on Github. We have created a distribution in standard repositories that a developer or user can download and auto-build CORD on a single node very quickly – hopefully in an hour or so,” said Larry Peterson, chief architect of ON.Lab and board member of the CORD Project. “We also provide excellent documentation in terms of white papers, design notes, videos and demos to make it really easy for developers and users to get started.”

More About the New CORD Reference Implementation

Both the open source ONOS and CORD Projects are hosted by The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration.

The new open reference implementation supports CORD’s three domains of use: residential, enterprise and mobile. It includes a hardware blueprint with guidance on OCP servers; switches and access blades assembly instructions; auto-configuring software; and testing infrastructure. It also features software distribution of the platform stack comprising:

●XOS: Everything-as-a-Service paradigm, service composition, multi-tenant services, and services with scalability and high availability;

●ONOS: SDN OS for service providers, scalability, performance, high availability, abstractions for apps and devices, disruptive and incremental SDN;

●Trellis: open source SDN fabric on bare metal, combined with virtual network overlay, unified control of underlay and overlay and many applications; and

●Merchant Silicon and White Boxes: servers, switches, and access (OLT, BBU,RAN) and optical (ROADM).

Developers can download a distribution and auto-build CORD on a single node reducing test and integration cycles by months. Using a continuous integration and continuous delivery approach makes code review and updates as smooth, automated and swift as possible. This makes it easy for operators to assemble and operate CORD Pods and services, and improves overall developer productivity.

In unifying SDN, NFV, and the Cloud, CORD goes beyond what each technology contributes in isolation:

• Fully Exploits Micro-Services: CORD not only supports conventional Software-as-a-Service, but also extends the cloud paradigm to include fiber-to-the-home and wireless access as elastic Access-as-a-Services.
• Fully Exploits Disaggregation: CORD not only supports legacy network functions in virtual machines, but also disaggregates functionality into finer-grain elements. For example, legacy BNGs are disaggregated into a vOLT – vSG – vRouter service graph.
• Fully Exploits SDN: CORD not only uses SDN to manage the switching fabric and implement service chaining, but also as a source of innovative services offerings for customers.

“CORD redefines the economics of broadband and is the biggest innovation in the access network since ADSL,” said Greg Whelan, principal at Greywale Insights, “While CORD can’t solve squirrel chews or eliminate make-ready, its elegance is in its simplicity. It really is a game changer for any service provider offering broadband and mobile access.”

“CORD is transformative for service providers and the industry,” said Peterson. “It helps service providers finally take advantage of open source SDN, NFV and Cloud technologies by creating a single integrated solution platform that they can use to offer innovative services with very attractive economics to their PON, 5G, and metro ethernet enterprise customers.”

Support from CORD Partners & Collaborators

“Customer response and interest in Ciena’s recent demonstration of the industry’s first commercially-hardened version of ONOS and turn-key CORD Pod has been phenomenal,” said Zsolt Haraszti, CTO of Blue Planet, Ciena. “As the CORD Project becomes an independent, open source project, we are committed to working closely with ON.Lab and the open source community, including service provider and vendor partners, to continue driving CORD adoption and innovation in the access virtualization space.”

“CORD has such an incredible momentum to transform operators around the globe.  With various successful POCs under its belt, CORD is poised to advance the open networking stage with the first major open source distribution,” said Joseph Sulistyo, senior director of network strategy, Radisys Corporation. “We are excited to be working with ON.Lab and CORD partners in providing a strong networking foundation and engineering shepherding to execute the open CORD project. We are committed to our continued participation in leveraging the open CORD blueprint to accelerate the path from lab experimentation to trials, helping customers to modernize and move to next generation networks.”

“CORD is an exciting new open source project. It has great momentum and SKT has been contributing to it with an emphasis on the mobile version. It has done multiple POCs and has its first major distribution out with a growing community,” said Kang-Won Lee, SVP of SK Telecom. “We look forward to our continued participation and using open reference implementation of CORD for experimentation and trials soon.”

The full list of CORD features can be found at https://wiki.opencord.org.

Whether an individual or an organization, as an open source project all are encouraged to get involved with the growing CORD community today. Download, test and build upon CORD, or join the project as a member.

Additional Resources

●Getting Started with CORD Project

●CORD Technical Features

About CORD Project

CORD™ (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) brings datacenter economics and cloud flexibility to the telco Central Office and to the entire access network. CORD is an open source service delivery platform that combines SDN, NFV, and elastic cloud services to network operators and service providers. It integrates ONOS, OpenStack, Docker, and XOS—all running on merchant silicon, white-box switches, commodity servers, and disaggregated access devices. The CORD reference implementation serves as a platform for multiple domains of use, with open source communities building innovative services for residential, mobile, and enterprise network customers. The CORD ecosystem comprises ON.Lab and organizations that are funding and contributing to the CORD initiative. These organizations include AT&T, China Unicom, Google, NTT Communications Corp., SK Telecom Co. Ltd., Verizon, Ciena Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Intel Corporation, NEC Corporation, Nokia, Radisys and Samsung Electronics Co. See the full list of members, including CORD’s collaborators, and learn how you can get involved with CORD at opencord.org.

CORD is an independently funded software project hosted by The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.

About ON.Lab

Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) is a non-profit organization founded by SDN inventors and leaders from Stanford University and UC Berkeley to foster open source communities for developing tools and platforms to realize the full potential of SDN, NFV and cloud technologies. ON.Lab provides engineering resources on behalf of the open source ONOS, CORD, and Mininet projects among others. For further information on ON.Lab, visit http://onlab.us/.

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Press Contact

Meredith Solberg

PR Manager at The Linux Foundation

msolberg@linuxfoundation.org

ON.Lab and CORD Contact

Bill Snow

VP of Engineering

bill@onlab.us