The Performance of Chassis and Scalability of Clos
Distributed Disaggregated Chassis (DDC) is a new architecture for building flexible, high-scale networking systems – from Service Provider routing to high-performance AI networking
DDC offers:
Disaggregated Chassis (DDC) continues to gain momentum in the communications industry, with service providers and network operators actively pushing for its adoption. Leading service providers, such as AT&T and KDDI and have already made significant deployments of the DDC solution across their live networks, using DriveNets Network Cloud. Many other network operators, including Comcast, Telefonica, Orange, Vodafone, and MTN, are also adopting open and disaggregated networks based on the OCP (DDC) and Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Disaggregated Distributed Backbone Router (DDBR) specifications.
Organizations with disaggregated solution implementations have observed cost reductions, accelerated innovation, and improved scalability.
The Operational Impacts of Supporting a Disaggregated, Distributed, Cloud-based Network Architecture
Software-based Innovation: DDC introduces a software-based, cloud-native network architecture, offering unprecedented flexibility and agility for rapid service deployment and integration.
Collapsed Networking Layers: DDC simplifies network infrastructure by merging multiple layers, reducing complexity, latency, and costs, while improving performance.
Field Proven: DDC’s effectiveness and reliability are validated in multiple real-world scenarios, demonstrating its capability to meet modern network demands with minimal risk.
No Vendor Lock-In – Mix and Match: DDC allows service providers to freely choose from a wide range of ASICs, hardware, software, and optics, eliminating vendor lock-in and encouraging a competitive, innovative environment.
Incremental Scalability: DDC supports scalable network growth with cost-effective, incremental capacity upgrades using white boxes as building blocks, optimizing capital expenditure.
Sustainability and Circular Economics: DDC enhances sustainability by optimizing resource use and extending infrastructure lifespan, reducing environmental impact and fostering circular economic principles.
Unified HW – Core to Edge: DDC employs a unified hardware approach throughout the network, using standard white boxes for all network domains.
Simplified Warehousing: DDC reduces network components to just two types of white boxes and a single software package, leading to lower inventory costs and a more streamlined supply chain.
Higher Availability: DDC’s design ensures high network availability with its distributed structure and redundancy, simplifying maintenance by replacing individual white boxes instead of entire systems.
DDC not only compares favorably but often surpasses the traditional chassis-based solutions for networking technology.
Network efficiency – DDC enables the high performance and reliability (no packet loss) of chassis backplane, at a much greater scalability as there are no metal enclosure limitation.
Predictable performance – DDC offers consistent and top performance for latency, throughput, and packet loss, all managed as a single network entity.
Enjoy the elastic scalability of a modern data center design.
Data plane scales by simply adding more white boxes , from a single white box to few hundreds of them, creating the largest router possible – not confined to the physical limits of a chassis.
Control plane of DDC scales out the centralized control plane on a pair of powerful x86 servers, unlike Clos control plane, which can only be scaled out per each leaf node.
Open Compute Project (OCP) – In collaboration with AT&T, UfiSpace HPE and Intel, DriveNets has had its contribution to the OCP DDC specification version 3 (v3) accepted. This latest version of the standard is based on DriveNets‘ Network Cloud architecture and specifically addresses mobile backhaul infrastructure, as well as Ethernet networking for high-performance AI workloads in large-scale clusters.
Telecom Infra Project (TIP) – TIP published a technical requirements document defining a disaggregated distributed backbone router (DDBR).
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