China Unicom and networking chip maker Cavium announced a targeted program for testing 5G target use cases on M-CORD SDN/NFV platform.
It uses Cavium silicon-based white box hardware in M-CORD racks populated with ThunderX ARM-based data center COTS servers and XPliant programmable SDN Ethernet switch-based white box switches.
China Unicom and Cavium will shortly commence trials in several locations in mainland China to explore the new service. Cavium and China Unicom will demonstrate Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) use cases developed through previously announced collaboration with China Unicom utilizing the ON.Lab M-CORD (Mobile Central Office Re-architected as data center) SDN/NFV platform at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai from Jun 28th – Jun 30th 2017.
This M-CORD SDN/NFV software platform and hardware rack are fully integrated with virtualized and disaggregated mobile infrastructure elements from the edge of the Radio Access Network (RAN) to distributed mobile core and the ONOS and XOS SDN and orchestration software.
It allows for a virtually turn-key operation in any central office or edge data center for a full NFV C-RAN deployment. The solution is a full Cavium powered rack combining the ThunderX ARM based data center servers with the award winning highly programmable XPliant Ethernet leaf and spine SDN switches which enable a compelling platform for M-CORD.
Raj Singh, VP and GM of the Network & Communications Group, Cavium
We are very excited to collaborate with China Unicom to explore 5G target use cases leveraging the M-CORD SDN/NFV platform and to work towards field deployment. A homogenous hardware architecture fully optimized for NFV and 5G functions is a key pre-requisite for field deployments.
Dr Tang Xiongyan, Chief Scientist of Network Technology Research Institute
Our collaboration with Cavium continues to deliver real progress and we are looking forward to trying M-CORD and virtualized RAN implementation in our network.
