Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center (CORD), an open source integrated solutions platform for service providers leveraging merchant silicon, white boxes, and open source platforms such as Open Network Operating System (ONOS), OpenStack, Docker, and the cloud operating system XOS, is now part of the Linux Foundation as a new independent project.

The Linux foundation is already home to many open source networking projects, including OpenDaylight and ONOS, so CORD is a natural fit for the non-profit foundation.

CORD was originally created by ON.Lab, whose co-founder Guru Parulkar also co-founded Open Networking Summit (ONS), which became part of the Linux Foundation earlier this year.

In an interview, Parulkar told me that he was very impressed with the way the Linux Foundation operates and the way it can bring together different players, representing different industries. “Because of Linux Foundation, we have been able to include more and more open source projects into the mix than we were able to do before.”

Parulkar believes CORD will have big impact in how service providers build their infrastructure. “If you look at any service provider today such as AT&T, Verizon, China Unicom, China Mobile… they operate thousands of central offices.” These central offices are kind gateways to all their customers, to residential customers, enterprise customers, mobile customers. “Today the central offices are built using closed proprietary hardware. When we hear that AT&T is not able to be as agile as they want to be, the reason is that the central offices are not enabling them to do that. What we are doing with CORD is kind of reinvent the central office and build it the same way data centers are built - using a mix of vendors, white boxes and open source technologies.”

As CORD becomes a Linux Foundation project, industry players like Google, Radisys and Samsung are joining CORD and ONOS as new partners. Google will host the first CORD Summit on July 29 at its Tech Corner Campus in Sunnyvale, Calif. The summit will bring together industry leaders, network architects and administrators, developers and engineers interested in building and using CORD to reinvent network access.