AT&T (NYSE: T) in conjunction with ONOS Project, PMC-Sierra and Sckipio will demonstrate a Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD) proof-of-concept (POC) at the upcoming Open Networking Summit (ONS2015).
As a growing number of service providers--including AT&T--look to transition away from a hardware to a software-centric network model that is reminiscent of web-based content providers and cloud providers, they are using a mix of software definable networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) to transform their carrier functions into workloads that are hosted on common, commodity infrastructure.
One of the potential benefits of CORD is that it can help service providers reduce development timelines and delivery of new products.
"These technologies create systems that do not need new standards to function and enable new behaviors in software, which decreases development time," said Tom Anschutz, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T, in a release. "Faster development time leads to rapid innovation, something the industry needs to continue satisfying data-hungry customers."
CORD reflects the idea of providing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and networking services as tenant applications for this infrastructure.
To bring in data center economies of scale and cloud-like agility to service providers CORD incorporates SDN, NFV and cloud with commodity infrastructure and open building blocks. The CORD solution POC spans the traditional Central Office, access including Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Networks (GPON) and G.fast as well as home/enterprise customer premises equipment (CPE).
CORD allows 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.
By using CORD, a large telco like AT&T can replace a set of fragmented, non-commodity elements that reside in current Central Offices where each site hosts more than 300 unique deployed appliances, each of which requires a physical install and specialized management.
During the Open Networking Summit from June 15-18, 2015, the demonstration will highlight the benefits of the CORD solution POC from the perspective of three end-users: service providers, subscribers and third-party providers.
For more:
- see the release
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