Radisys Corp. (NASDAQ: RSYS) and Calix Inc. (NYSE: CALX) say they have teamed to create a joint, PON-based approach to cloud access networks compliant with the Residential Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (Residential CORD or R-CORD) architecture. The turnkey R-CORD offering combines CORD-compliant software and hardware building blocks with Radisys's OCP-based DCEngine platform and Calix's AXOS E9-2 Intelligent Edge System. The latter benefits in this context from the recently announced AXOS OFx Connector with R-CORD compliant open source Virtual OLT Hardware Abstraction (vOLT-HA) integration software.
CORD is a joint ON.Lab and Linux Foundation initiative to bring open source-enabled virtualization to carrier access networks (see "ON.Lab, The Linux Foundation establish CORD as formal project"). R-CORD is one of three domains addressed within the project, with mobile and enterprise the others. AT&T was an early driver of CORD (see "AT&T, ON.Lab to lead CORD proof-of-concept demonstration"), while CenturyLink has announced it has developed and will deploy a broadband gateway based on R-CORD principles (see "CenturyLink deploys virtualized broadband network gateway based on CORD").
With momentum building behind CORD, Calix and Radisys believe they have timed their joint end-to-end offering perfectly. "CORD has captured wide interest in the industry as a preferred migration strategy architecture for service providers looking to bring data center economies and cloud agility to their networks," commented Shane Eleniak, vice president of systems products at Calix. "Calix and Radisys are committed to enabling these migrations at a pace that matches the preference of each service provider…. With this announcement, R-CORD has just made the leap from theory to reality."
The companies say that multiple Tier 1 service providers have launched trials of their combined approach to R-CORD. The field trials see Calix provide the physical optical termination system, while the Radisys DCEngine 16U Integrated Rack provides the multi-rack level network functions virtualization (NFVi) and container-based infrastructure necessary to host potentially thousands of virtualized network functions (VNFs) and applications under open software-defined networking control.
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