AT&T's ECOMP is its Next Big Thing

AT&T is moving quickly to transform itself into a software company, said John Donovan, Chief Strategy Officer, in a keynote at the sixth annual Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California.  Last year, AT&T hit its target of virtualizing 5% of its network functions.  This year, the company aims to increase its NFV rollout to 30% of network fuctions.  This includes some 39 VNFs going into the production infrastructure. As of today, 14 million wireless customers are on AT&T's fully virtualized mobile packet core

Some additional highlights:

• AT&T next big thing is ECOMP - Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management & Policy) Architecture. Donovan describes ECOMP as the most sophisticated software project that AT&T has ever undertaken -- the engine that powers its software-centric network.  The goal is to enable high utilization of network resources by combining dynamic, policy-enforced functions forcomponent and workload shaping, placement, execution, and administration. Over the past 18 months, a team of 300 AT&T developers has assembled 8 million lines of codes. It is designed to interoperate with Open Stack.  AT&T has just published a whitepaper (link below) on ECOMP and is inviting industry commentary.  If there enough community interest, AT&T is considering making ECOMP open source.
• AT&T continues to make progress on Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD), which was first showcased at ONS last year. The idea behind CORD is to use SDN and NFV to transform carrier functions into workloads that are hosted on common, commodity infrastructure. AT&T trials for CORD begin this month.
• AT&T has doubled its usage of open source software in the past year. The company is participating in many open source initiatives and has just joined the Open Compute Project.
• Donovan sees virtual reality as being a huge driver of bandwidth
• Regarding competition and/or cooperation with other big cloud providers, Donovan said AT&T is comfortable with its role as owner/operator of its infrastructure.
• AT&T is now serving 26 million IoT devices.
• 60% of AT&T total network traffic is video 
• AT&T is carrying more than 114 petabytes on its network daily.

http://att.com/ecomp

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Updates for CORD - Central Office Re-architected as Data Center

Vendors are ready to show the first reference implementation of CORD - the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center - initiative within the ONOS Project. uUse cases for CORD are on display at this week's Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California.

CORD is expected to bring the economies of scale and the agility of cloud computing to the service provider central office by leveraging infrastructure constructed from commodity building blocks. It uses merchant silicon, white boxes and open-source platforms such as ONOS, OpenStack, and XOS.

CORD Use Cases Showcased at ONS:

Enterprise (E-CORD) - Extends CORD with enterprise services and enables service providers to offer SDN-WAN, as well as MEF carrier Ethernet services. That is the ability to create multi-site virtual networks on demand with customer-specified services such as intrusion detection, WAN acceleration, and others. E-CORD POC will be demonstrated at ONS.
Mobile (M-CORD) - Integrates disaggregated and virtualized RAN, disaggregated and virtualized EPC, and mobile edge computing with CORD and helps service providers and vendors move closer to realizing 5G. M-CORD POC will be demonstrated at ONS.
Residential (R-CORD) - Combines vCPE and virtualized wireline access technologies (e.g., GPON, 10GPON, G.Fast) with cloud-based subscriber services (e.g., parental control, video delivery). R-

Companies are actively contributing to and advancing CORD: AT&T, China Unicom, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, Verizon, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, NEC, Nokia
Collaborators: Accton, AirHop, Broadcom, Cavium, Celestica, Ciena, Cobham, Flextronics, NetCracker, PMC Sierra, Radisys.

"AT&T supports the goals and achievements that are embodied in CORD," said Andre Fuetsch, senior vice president of Architecture and Design at AT&T. "The work is pushing the boundaries of many technologies and architectures, as well as open source and open spec hardware. We are learning from the CORD experiments and trials and using this knowledge to refine AT&T's Integrated Cloud. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with ON.Lab and others in advancing NFV and SDN technology."

http://www.linuxfoundation.org

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MEF & ON.Lab Collaborate To Advance Open Third Network Services

The MEF and ON.Lab announced a collaboration centered on ON.Lab’s E-CORD and the MEF’s new OpenCS (Open Connectivity Services) and OpenLSO (Open Lifecycle Service Orchestration) Projects. Initial collaboration showcases ON.Lab’s E-CORD as one of the first open source instances for dynamic/agile, assured, and orchestrated Third Network Services.

OpenCS is a network ecosystem that enables SDN and NFV reference implementations of open source software and open spec hardware for MEF-defined services, starting with Carrier Ethernet 2.0 and evolving to Layer 3 IP and above. OpenLSO is an orchestration ecosystem that enables a reference implementation of open source solutions and interfaces that adheres to the MEF LSO specification.

Areas of CORD and MEF collaboration include:

• E-CORD Proof of Concept Demonstrations / OpenCS Reference Builds. E-CORD demonstration as a pioneering OpenCS reference build at the ONS 2016 conference being held this week in Santa Clara, California. The PoC will show how E-CORD can enable service providers to provide customized, programmable, on-demand CE 2.0 E-Line services using SDN & NFV. During 2016, the E-CORD platform will evolve to include enhanced support for MEF service models and will include a broader set of CE 2.0 services in future
• E-CORD Integration With MEF LSO. Research on how to align E-CORD with OpenLSO functions within the overall MEF LSO Reference Architecture. This includes discussions on how E-CORD can evolve to communicate with service orchestration functions using the MEF LSO Presto Management Interface.
• LSO Hackathons. Participation at the Euro16 and MEF16 LSO Hackathons to be held at the MEF Quarterly Meeting in Rome during 25 – 28 April and at MEF16 respectively, where programmers will orchestrate an E-Line instantiation in E-CORD using XOS over LSO Presto.
• MEF16. Participation as an open source organization partner at the MEF16 global networking event held during 7 – 10 November in Baltimore-Washington, DC.

http://www.MEF16.com
http://onlab.us
https://www.mef.net/

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Skyport Raises $30 Million from GV and Cisco

Skyport Systems announced a $30 million round of funding led by GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), with participation from Cisco Investments, Thomvest Ventures, Northgate Capital and InstantScale, as well as existing investors Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Intel Capital. This Series C round brings total Skyport funding to $67 million.

Skyport, which is based in Mountain View, California, specializes in secure infrastructure for protecting IT environments from attacks while providing total visibility into all traffic and administrative changes. Skyport SkySecure is the first commercial Hyper-Secure Infrastructure architected from the ground up to provide continuous validation to ensure system integrity and remote management to ensure auditability.

“Security leaders have been saying for decades that security needs to be built in from the ground up yet most solutions just bolt on or around. If organizations are serious about protecting their information they need to consider that now is the time to re-platform for security.” said Art Gilliland, CEO of Skyport Systems. “Skyport Systems’ approach delivers powerful security protections in a pre-integrated easy-to-use system saving customers money and helping them achieve a high level of security and compliance.”

http://www.skyportsystems.com


  

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AT&T Expands its Gigapower Fiber Networks

AT&T expanded its Gigapower Internet service, which offers residential broadband speeds up to 1 Gbps, in the following areas:

Chicago: Hampshire, Munster and St. John
Dallas: Richardson
Houston: Friendswood, Pearland, Manvel and Missouri City
Miami: Coral Springs, North Miami and Tamarac
San Antonio: Converse

http://about.att.com/newsroom/ultrafast_gigabit_internet_speeds_march_2016.html

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