Understanding CORD Deployments (Central Office Rearchitected as a Data Center)

In the midst of growth in edge computing driven by hyperscale entities, an important and emergent technology, CORD (Central Office Rearchitected as a Data Center) is being rapidly deployed by a majority of global carriers in support of their edge initiatives. In a CORD deployment, service providers reconfigure their existing municipal Central Office (CO) facilities into a low-latency edge computing ‘cloudlets’ and Colocation MTDC’s. CORD initiatives strive to replace today’s purpose-built hardware with more agile software-based elements and in doing so, ensure that legacy carrier COs become an integral part of a larger cloud strategy, enabling resilient low latency network services to customers. This talk will focus on the following areas: • What is CORD? Why CORD? • Explanation of the business/customer value proposition of CORD • Applications that benefit from CORD builds (5G, FTTx....) • Ongoing builds/carrier ecosystem • Technologies supporting CORD builds (optoelectronics, power distribution, fiber....) • Reference architecture of a typical implementation • Physical differences in CORD infrastructure vs traditional Data Centers