Comcast has Achieved Production Roll-out of Trellis Open Source Networking Fabric

Advanced open source SDN network delivers industry leading flexibility and efficiency

MENLO PARK, Calif., Sept 13, 2019 - The ONF today announced that Comcast has reached production roll-out of the Trellis Open Source Network Fabric as part of Comcast’s Distributed Access Architecture (DAA) buildout.

Comcast has successfully deployed Trellis in multiple markets, and rollouts are accelerating.   By using Trellis, Comcast is delivering improved network scalability and greatly enhanced space and power facility efficiencies in their head-ends.  Open source and a white box based ethernet backhaul is integral to Comcast’s next generation access strategy, and Trellis plays a central and essential role in this architecture.  The DAA specification calls for an ethernet-based Converged Interconnect Network (CIN), and Comcast is using Trellis in this CIN role.  

ONF’s Trellis is the leading open-source, SDN based, multi-purpose spine-leaf switching fabric supporting distributed access-and-edge networks, NFV and edge cloud applications. Trellis leverages the ONOS® open source SDN controller, the OpenFlow® protocol and white box switches to create a scalable, resilient, cost effective networking fabric. 

Trellis implementations are significantly simpler and more adaptable than a conventional network that relies on embedded routing and switching protocols running on each individual switch. For example, instead of having to configure and run distributed multicast routing protocols, intelligence is centralized in Trellis and run in a cloud-native fashion on a resilient cluster of standard compute nodes.  This makes network design, deployment, debug and upgrades much simpler, while minimizing network complexity and cost.

“In collaboration with the ONF and a team of supply chain vendors, Comcast is deploying the open source Trellis platform as the networking fabric in our next generation access network,” said Elad Nafshi, Senior Vice President, Next Generation Access Networks, Comcast.  “This has been a multiple year journey from design, to extensive field trails and finally to production rollout, and we’re impressed with the results and the advantages that using open source and Trellis are delivering for us as we upgrade our access network.”

“The open source ecosystem created by ONF has collectively established a new ‘Distributed DevOps’ model through the process of trialing, hardening and deploying Trellis with Comcast.  This has established a new formula for open source whereby an operator, ONF and a consortium of commercial entities come together to collectively build and stand behind a deployment,” said Saurav Das, Vice President of Engineering for the ONF.

About the Open Networking Foundation:

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is an operator led consortium spearheading disruptive network transformation. Now the recognized leader for open source solutions for operators, the ONF first launched in 2011 as the standard bearer for Software Defined Networking (SDN). Led by its operator partners AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Google, NTT Group and Turk Telekom, the ONF is driving vast transformation across the operator space. For further information visit https://opennetworking.org

Media Contact:
Greg Cross
PR for the ONF
greg@opennetworking.org