DriveNets put its Network Cloud through its paces during performance testing with a Tier 1 European service provider.
DriveNets' Network Cloud software-based disaggregated router was deployed in a proof-of-concept trial for multicast and unicast TV with live viewers. According to DriveNets, slow convergence bogs down transmission while buffering delays viewing and degrades the quality of a live multicast stream.
While DriveNets has yet to announce a customer, the vendor said its Network Cloud testing programs have been running in multiple Tier 1 international service providers for a year. DriveNets said its distributed architecture can be more easily installed remotely than traditional routers, which probably came in handy during the coronavirus pandemic when shelter-in-place policies were effect. DriveNets noted that some of the tests have evolved into live deployments.
DriveNets said its customers said their test results were superior to any alternative chassis-based solutions both in terms of scale (192 Tbps) and in terms of convergence (sub 1 milliseconds) times of the protocols, although the results could vary based on customer configuration.
"DriveNets Network Cloud architecture has consistently demonstrated very low convergence time, vastly lower than 50 milliseconds, which is the expected carrier grade benchmark in the industry," DriveNets said in its release.
"These strong performance results as validated by a tier one service provider put to rest any remaining doubts about the scalability of a distributed network operating System (NOS) on a white box cluster. DriveNets Network Cloud has proven it can meet and even exceed the performance levels of proprietary hardware chassis routers," said Roy Chua, analyst and founder of AvidThink. "This new cloud architecture comes with added benefit of agility and flexibility and the opportunity for an open ecosystem."
DriveNets is front and center for a new wave of disaggregation brought about by improvements in merchant silicon by companies such as of Broadcom, Innovium, Intel, Marvell and Nvidia. DriveNets' Network Cloud can help service providers and cloud hyperscale providers disaggregated their networks from the core to the edge.
DriveNets has deployed Broadcom's merchant silicon Jericho2 chipset on its routing software that supports packet-forwarding white boxes and also supports Broadcom's Ramon chip.
DriveNets' Network Cloud software-based disaggregated router is the only router on the market designed to scale 100G/400G ports from a single box router running at 4 Tbps to a cluster of white boxes that operate as a single router at speeds of up of 768 Tbps, which it says forms the highest capacity router on the market.
In September of last year, AT&T announced it had put its specifications for a distributed disaggregated chassis (DDC) white box architecture into the Open Compute Project (OCP.)
AT&T's DDC design, which was built on Broadcom's Jericho2 family of merchant chips, aims to define a standard set of configurable building blocks on less costly service-class routers ranging from a single-line card systems, known as "pizza boxes," to large, disaggregated chassis clusters.
Currently, DriveNets is the only solution on the market that supports the disaggregated chassis (DDC) design, which would seem to make it a good candidate for use by AT&T.
AT&T has said it plans to apply the Jericho2 DDC design to the network edge and core routers that make up its global IP common backbone, which is the core network that carries all of AT&T's IP traffic.