ONF Demonstrates CORD-Powered Open Innovation Pipeline Solutions at ONS

Maintaining rapid project growth, CORD Project welcomes new collaborators Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Ixia and Xpose

SANTA CLARA, Calif. April 3, 2017 – CORD Project, the community advancing the leading open source service delivery platform that combines SDN, NFV, and elastic cloud services to transform the edge of operator networks, today announces continued project momentum with new collaborators Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, Ixia and Xpose, and a significant presence planned for Open Networking Summit in support of the theme “The Power of Understanding CORD®.”

CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) is a platform combining leading SDN, NFV and Cloud technologies to build nimble in-line datacenters at the edge of operator networks. CORD integrates a curated collection of dozens of leading open source projects, thus making available a fully-integrated platform for building innovative solutions for network operators. Designed to leverage the best of modern DevOps application development methodologies, CORD delivers an open, programmable, agile platform for service creation.

CORD contributors will join the broader ONF community in convening at the Santa Clara Convention Center this week for ONS, the industry’s largest and most inclusive open networking and orchestration event hosted by The Linux Foundation. ONF will showcase the new Open Innovation Pipeline and the capabilities of CORD Solutions in ONOS and CORD mini summits and interactive demonstrations, including Residential (R-CORD), 5G Mobile (M-CORD) and Enterprise VPN (E-CORD). 

“Over the last year, CORD has continued to evolve at record speed,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director of ONF, ON.Lab and Stanford Platform Lab. “Much of the success of CORD has been driven by the various pre-integrated releases based on CORD to deliver solutions for various operator use cases. We’re excited to gather with the equally fast-growing CORD community at ONS to celebrate recent developments and collaborate on future innovation.”

CORD Open Source Components

At its core, CORD is a curated integration of numerous open source projects, thus creating a platform for innovation. CORD incorporates a broad range of leading edge upstream open source components to build a next-generation cloud-native datacenter. The complete range of IT functionality is provided, including compute, storage and networking.  CORD creates an integrated whole with the addition of specialized SDN and NFV capabilities to enable service creation (with the XOS project). More details on specific project integrations can be found here.

CORD as a Platform for Building Solutions

One of the benefits of CORD is the pre-integrated solutions that result from combining numerous open source elements into solutions. OpenStack, for example, is used as an optional component for larger CORD deployments where full IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-Service) capabilities are needed. To address the shortcomings of OpenStack for specific applications, CORD integrates ONOS software for networking along with other customizations to ensure the sum of the parts functions as a unified whole. Users can download the free open source distribution and bring up a CORD POD with little-to-no understanding of the internals and intricacies the underlying components.

The ONS CORD Demonstrations: 

• “Central Office in a Day” will showcase how a complete CORD-based carrier Central Office (CO) can be constructed from the ground up to start offering services within a few short hours, a feat that would typically take months using legacy technologies. This demonstration highlights the operational efficiencies that result from the intelligent integration of SDN, NFV and Cloud technologies, and the fundamental power of the CORD platform. 
• “Rapid Service Enablement” will exhibit the ease of crafting new services and the power of the micro-service architecture enabled as part of CORD’s use of the XOS project (XaaS Operating System).
• “M-CORD: Open Reference Implementation to Enable 5G” will present the first end-to-end open reference solution for mobile CORD (M-CORD) that provides the capabilities needed to unlock 5G innovation across the open networking ecosystem. 
• “E-CORD: SD-WAN Done Right” will show zero touch provisioning of enterprise WAN networks, with built-in analytics and strong SLAs.

More About the New CORD Collaborators: 

Sprint Corporation: Sprint (NYSE: S) is a communications services company that creates more and better ways to connect its customers to the things they care about most.

“CORD combines the best of SDN, NFV and Cloud technologies, creating an integrated platform that enables agile deployment of innovative cloud-scale services,” said Dr. Ron Marquardt, Vice President of Technology at Sprint. “We are excited to work closely with leading ecosystem players to drive greater scalability and innovation. Through the contribution of our own open source code for CUPS and SDN, we appreciate the power of the community-driven co-development process and encourage its rapid adoption throughout the mobile industry.”

Deutsche Telekom: Leading European service provider DT is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies with more than 165 million mobile customers, 28.5 million fixed-network lines, and 18.5 million broadband lines.

Ixia: Ixia provides testing, visibility, and security solutions, strengthening applications across physical and virtual networks for enterprises, service providers, and network equipment manufacturers. Ixia offers companies trusted environments in which to develop, deploy and operate, while ensuring protection of their networks to make applications stronger.

Xpose, Inc.: Xpose is a live video streaming, services and analytics company with a flagship platform and social companion app leveraging patented Shake & Stream™ technology, optimized for personal and public safety uses. Xpose is collaborating with major telecom infrastructure providers along with security and safety industry leaders to bring the highest performance solution and the best end user experience to the marketplace.

So significant is the early success of the project, IHS reports 70% of operators plan to deploy CORD in their central offices. The diverse and rapidly CORD community comprises service provider partners AT&T, China Unicom, Google, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, and Verizon, leading vendors Ciena, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, NEC, Nokia, Radisys and Samsung, and more than 30 collaborating organizations.

Whether an individual or an organization, all are encouraged to get involved with the growing open source CORD community. CORD is an ONF/ON.Lab open source project and part of Linux Foundation’s project portfolio.

Additional Resources

• Learn more about M-CORD on the Wiki
• Join the growing CORD community
• Start on the 5G Journey with the integrated M-CORD solution 
• Getting Started with CORD Project
• CORD Technical Features

About ON.Lab
Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) has created the leading open source platforms CORD® (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) and ONOS® (Open Network Operating System (ONOS) for service providers. Founded by SDN’s inventors and leaders to foster an open source community to realize the full potential of SDN, ON.Lab brings innovative ideas from leading edge research and delivers high-quality open source platforms on which members of its ecosystem can build solutions. For further information, visit http://onlab.us/.

About ONF

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), the recognized leader and standard bearer for SDN.  Launched in 2011, the ONF has successfully taken Software Defined Networking (SDN) from obscurity to the universally accepted vision for next generation networking.

The ONF is led by a board including representation from leading operators including AT&T, Google, NTT Communications, SK Telecom and Verizon. The merger of ONF and ON.Lab is expected to be complete in late 2017. For further information visit http://www.opennetworking.org/.