Central Office Re-architected as Datacenter (CORD), available at http://opencord.org/, is a collaborative effort of AT&T and Open Networking Lab to model Telco Central Office as a data center for rapid service creation and monetization. It aims to leverage SDN and NFV innovations from the data center and commodity hardware to build agile, cost-effective networks deriving significant CAPEX and OPEX savings over an existing, disparate range of proprietary network devices.

CORD re-architects the Central Office as a data center by unifying SDN, NFV, and cloud technologies. The SDN approach of separating data and control planes with standard APIs enables the leveraging of commodity hardware based on merchant silicon driving down costs and making control planes programmable in supporting innovation. NFV makes the move to virtual machines from hardware appliances and cloud support scalable. Resilient network topologies thereby deriving cost savings and platform for innovation:

Figure 4: CORD architecture

OpenStack, ONOS, and XOS form the software building blocks for the CORD architecture.

OpenStack provides core IaaS, supporting the provisioning of Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks.

ONOS serves as a platform for implementing the control applications. OpenVirteX (OVX), is an ONOS sub-system invoked via OpenStack's Neutron API and is responsible for embedding virtual networks in the underlying switching fabric. You can explore more about OVX at http://ovx.onlab.us/getting-started/tutorial/.