Google, Samsung, Radisys join CORD project

The Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) and The Linux Foundation have spun off the Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center (CORD) initiative into its own, new open source project, and Google, Samsung Electronics and Radisys are joining the CORD and ONOS projects as new partners.

Google plans to host the first CORD Summit on July 29 at Google Sunnyvale Tech Corner Campus in California, where industry leaders, network architects and administrators, developers and engineers will convene.

CORD combines NFV, SDN and the elasticity of commodity clouds to bring data center economics and cloud agility to the telco central office. Major service providers like AT&T, SK Telecom, Verizon, China Unicom and NTT Communications are already supporting CORD, which lets the operator manage their central offices using declarative modeling languages for agile, real-time configuration of new customer services. 

"CORD has the potential to significantly improve the economics and agility of access networks globally," said Ankur Jain, principal engineer at Google, in a prepared statement. "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."

Although AT&T has been especially aggressive about moving to a virtualized, software-defined ecosystem, former Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg recently told FierceWirelessTech that the overall wireless industry remains in the very early stages of this transition. He estimated that while AT&T has set a goal of virtualizing 75 percent of its network by 2020, the bulk of the global wireless industry likely won't be anywhere near that target.

That's probably all the more reason the CORD community wants to get more organizations into its fold. CORD's supporters said that while it initially was 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. They expected that CORD development and use in production networks will accelerate.

The summit on July 29 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.

For more:
- see this ON.Lab release
- see this RCR story

Related articles:
Ericsson CEO: Almost all our products are already virtualized, but industry moving slowly to SDN, NFV
Verizon hooks up with ONOS project, joining AT&T, SK Telecom
ON.Lab aims to disrupt with SDN Open Source Network Operating System