AT&T, ONOS Project and other Players to Unveil COR
Post# of 17650
Today : Thursday 11 June 2015
MENLO PARK, Calif., June 11, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- ON.Lab today announced that a team comprised of AT&T*, ONOS project, PMC-Sierra (Nasdaq MCS) and Sckipio will showcase the first public demonstration of the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD) proof-of-concept (POC) at next week's Open Networking Summit (ONS2015) in Santa Clara, Calif.
Many carriers in both the telecom and cable fields are espousing next generation architectures that borrow heavily from web-scale data centers and cloud providers. With this, they want to use SDN and NFV to transform their carrier functions into workloads that are hosted on common, commodity infrastructure. "CORD" refers to this approach of providing infrastructure-as-a-service and networking services as tenant applications for this infrastructure.
"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."
CORD combines SDN, NFV and cloud with commodity infrastructure and open building blocks to bring in data center economies of scale and cloud-like agility to service providers. 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. In effect, this common infrastructure replaces the fragmented, non-commodity one in today's Central Offices where each site hosts more than 300 unique deployed appliances, each requiring a physical install and specialized management.
The first CORD solution POC will be demonstrated at the Open Networking Summit from June 15-18, 2015 as part of the SDN Solutions Showcase. The demo will highlight the benefits of the CORD solution POC from the perspective of three end-users: service providers, subscribers and third-party providers.
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.
PMC-Sierra, Inc. (PMC®), the leading semiconductor and software solutions vendor, developed the standalone OpenFlow-enabled GPON OLT MAC to virtualize the traditional OLT, creating the first vOLT-enabled device. Sckipio Technologies, the leader in G.fast modems, provided the OpenFlow-enabled DPU to demonstrate CORD with G.fast access technology.
"PMC is a long standing supplier of field-proven, merchant GPON silicon and software to international service providers," said Babak Samimi, Vice President of Marketing and Applications for PMC's Communications Business Unit. "As the selected GPON partner in ONOS Project's CORD initiative, we augmented our GPON software stack to enable the full data plane and control plane visibility required for the targeted NFV architecture. The combination of our proven architecture and fast turnaround of a new software interface was the catalyst allowing ONOS Project to demonstrate the POC."
"Service providers want the freedom to manage their networks in more effective, flexible, and efficient ways," said David Baum, CEO of Sckipio, the G.fast technology company. "By collaborating in the CORD solution, Sckipio will ensure G.fast is well integrated into the end-to-end CORD solution, which will quickly deliver the freedom service providers demand."
The CORD team will continue to expand and bring in new organizations including additional merchant silicon vendors, white box vendors, software vendors providing Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs), applications, services and support, testing and several others.
"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."