At next week’s Open Networking Summit (ONS2015) in Santa Clara, California, AT&T, ONOS project, PMC-Sierra and Sckipio will showcase the first public demonstration of the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD) proof-of-concept (POC).
The idea behind CORD is to use SDN and NFV to transform carrier functions into workloads that are hosted on common, commodity infrastructure. The CORD solution POC spans the Telco Central Office, access including Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Networks (GPON) and G.fast as well as home/enterprise customer premises equipment (CPE). CORD enables service providers to build an underlying common infrastructure with white boxes using ONOS (carrier-grade open source SDN Control Plane), OpenStack (virtual infrastructure management), and XOS (an open source service orchestration/management platform built on OpenStack) with a diversity of organizations building the services and solutions that ride above.
Key capabilities demonstrated at ONS will include:
- Proof-of-concept Central Office: Highlights the open software and hardware building blocks for CORD – ONOS, XOS, OpenStack, white box switches, commodity servers, OpenFlow-enabled GPON OLT MAC from PMC, and OpenFlow-enabled G.fast distribution point unit (DPU) connected to a G.fast CPE bridge from Sckipio.
- Service Provider-focused capabilities
- SDN Control, orchestration and management with ONOS, OpenStack and XOS on commodity infrastructure
- An open high-performance leaf-spine fabric
- OpenFlow-enabled PON OLT MAC hardware enabling virtualization of the traditional OLT
- OpenFlow-enabled G.fast DPU
- Access-as-service, Subscriber-as-a-service, Internet-as-a-service Caching/Content delivery-as-a-service, Virtualized functions including Firewall, URL Filtering, Parental Control, BNG
- Service Provider portal for intuitive provisioning, management, monitoring of infrastructure and services
- Subscriber-focused capabilities
- A simple CPE that replaces existing complex CPEs and can be managed by ONOS
- Subscriber Services: Internet, Firewall, Parental Control
- Subscriber portal for signing up for and managing services
- Third-Party Provider-focused capabilities
- Third-party provider services: Content delivery (Caching) for its own content in the Service Provider network
- Third-party provider portal for signing up for and managing services
- CORD POC software used for the demo at ONS 2015 will be available publicly in the ONOS “Drake” release that is slated for the end of August, 2015. Beyond the ONS demo, the CORD solution will undergo the next phase of development and advance to lab trials. A CORD “Pod” bundling together the software and hardware building blocks into a ready-to-use system, will be made available for service provider lab trials by the end of 2015.
“SDN and NFV are speeding up innovation, as seen in projects like CORD,” said Tom Anschutz, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T. “These technologies create systems that do not need new standards to function and enable new behaviors in software, which decreases development time. Faster development time leads to rapid innovation, something the industry needs to continue satisfying data-hungry customers.”
“The first CORD proof-of-concept is a big step towards demonstrating AT&T and other providers’ vision of reinventing the central office to bring data center economies of scale and cloud-style agility to their networks,” said Guru Parulkar, Executive Director, ON.Lab and ONRC. “With CORD, service providers can architect their central offices using common, commodity infrastructure such as ONOS, OpenStack, XOS, white box switches and servers. CORD also represents an open and unique opportunity with AT&T as the leading service provider, ON.Lab and ONOS project as providers of open source software platforms, and merchant silicon vendors PMC-Sierra and Sckipio. This team plans to enhance the solution with new features and harden it, bring in new players and advance CORD from lab trials all the way to deployment.”
