CORD Build 2017

CORD is a disruptive technology aiming to redesign Telco Central Offices, bringing new standards of efficiency and agility.Ground-breaking NFV solutions have been developed in OpenCORD, shaking up the Service Providers networking model, as more and more functions, traditionally done in specialized hardware, are virtualized in CORD.But what about the physical networking infrastructure – the switches? Are they only good to provide connectivity? Rich in capabilities, switches can offer more services for CORD. Comprehensive telemetry, sophisticated QoS, NFV offload are just a few examples of what XPliant flexible hardware can do, while processing the traffic @ Tb throughput.Cavium has ported its' XPliant Family of programmable switches to ONOS Controller, empowering CORD to tailor the physical underlay Fabric characteristics to each of the Mobile/Residential/Enterprise use-cases specifics.With Cavium-Xpliant Programmable switches, the Fabric behavior and scale does not have to be one-size-fit-all; application-definable Fabric is not a fantasy.I believe that the next step in CORD evolution should be capitalizing on the benefits of both the flexible physical network and the virtualized NFVs.The result, a truly Software-Defined Network, programmatically adjustable to deployments needs, will be a big step forward to deliver on CORD's vision of offering an economics-efficient and agile solution.