ON.Lab and The Linux Foundation Form CORD Project to Define the Future of Access

Growing open source community unites around the Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center Project; Google, Radisys & Samsung join initiative

San Francisco, July 26, 2016–Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) and The Linux Foundation today announce the formation of the Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center CORD™ initiative as a new, independent open source project. In addition, Google, Radisys and Samsung Electronics Co. are joining CORD and ONOS® Projects as new partners.

Google will host the first CORD Summit on July 29 at Google Sunnyvale Tech Corner Campus in California, which will unite industry leaders, network architects and administrators, developers and engineers interested in building and using CORD to reinvent network access.

“We are delighted to welcome Google to the open source ONOS and CORD partnerships,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director at ON.Lab. “Given Google’s track record as a provider of cloud and access services, we anticipate it will play an important role in strengthening the CORD architecture, implementation, and deployments.”

“We are also delighted to partner with Radisys, a leading system integrator in the service provider space, and Samsung, which is committed to advancing next-generation mobile technologies. CORD is very well-positioned for future growth,” said Parulkar. “Radisys’ leadership for an open, vendor-agnostic solution for central office transformation will be critical in providing turn-key CORD Pods that will accelerate development and adoption of CORD, enabling ground-breaking network transformation. And Samsung as a leader in mobile networking will help ONOS and CORD in this important domain of use.”

Designed to support connectivity and cloud-based services for residential, enterprise and mobile subscribers, CORD delivers an open source integrated solutions platform for service providers leveraging merchant silicon, white boxes, and open source platforms such as ONOS, OpenStack, Docker, and XOS.

“CORD has the potential to significantly improve the economics and agility of access networks globally,” said Ankur Jain, principal engineer at Google. “We are excited to join CORD, host its inaugural summit and work closely with leading ecosystem players to bring greater scalability and rapid innovation to access networks.”

“CORD presents a revolutionary architecture that uniquely exploits the best of SDN, NFV, and Cloud technologies, creating cutting-edge connectivity and cloud-scale services. Radisys is excited to join ONOS and CORD Projects as partner together with Google, Samsung, and other industry leaders,” said Brian Bronson, Radisys’ president and CEO. “As a disruptive provider of mobile access, core, IMS, and telco datacenter integration solutions, Radisys is committed to accelerating service operators’ plans in transitioning to personalized telco cloud environment. This transition will result in transformational TCO savings while enabling untethered agility to better handle and monetize the ongoing explosive growth in data and video traffic.”

“As a leading provider of mobile broadband networking solutions, we see great potential in CORD and software like NFV and SDN, which are key enablers for innovative services and efficient network operations,” said Paul Kyungwhoon Cheun, Executive Vice President and Head of Next Generation Business Team at Samsung Electronics Co. “Samsung is very focused on advancing the latest technologies that can benefit network operators and enable the next generation of innovative user services and applications.”

CORD’s Evolution In the Market

Initially developed as a use case for the open source SDN operating system ONOS, CORD has experienced major momentum and adoption among service providers and vendors during the past year. Now as a separate project with its own governance, partners, collaborators, and contributors, the community is actively collaborating and accelerating CORD development and use in production networks.

The summit will feature keynotes from CORD community partners and collaborators including AT&T, China Unicom, Google, ON.Lab, and The Linux Foundation. Topics for discussion include the CORD architecture, use cases, building with and using CORD and the technical roadmap.

“Service providers are eager to leverage new open source technologies and platforms to transform their infrastructure,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “CORD provides service providers with a framework to re-architect their traditional central offices into next-generation data centers, using new technologies like SDN, NFV and cloud technologies that are going mainstream.”

Click here to register and view the complete CORD Summit agenda.

CORD Reinvents the Central Office

CORD utilizes the elasticity of commodity clouds to enable data center economics and cloud agility in the central office environment. Previously gridlocked by closed systems and interdependent hardware and software, service providers can now offer flexible hardware specifications, platform software and services customized to their customers’ usage needs.

The diverse CORD community comprises service provider partners AT&T, China Unicom, Google, NTT Communications, Radisys, SK Telecom, and Verizon, vendors Ciena, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, NEC, Nokia and Samsung, and a long list of other vendors and system integrators.

The CORD Project allows subscribers to configure and manage service packages with Web-like simplicity and automated internet-like provisioning. With open API’s and built-in security, CORD architecture enables service providers to quickly and safely add third-party service offerings to provide subscribers with a wide array of today’s and tomorrow’s services.

Whether an individual or an organization, all are encouraged to get involved with the growing open source CORD community. Both the ONOS and CORD Projects are hosted by The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration.

Additional Resources

●      Download, test and build upon CORD

●      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/.

###

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