Disaggregation Mythbusters

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Hi and welcome back to CloudNets, where networks meet cloud.
And this is the season three premiere.
Yeah, we didn’t believe we’ll see the day, so today we’re going to talk about some myths about disaggregated distributed chassis or Network Cloud or whatever.
And we have our famous mythbuster.
Yes, that’s me. Run.
Thank you for joining.
So Run, I’m going to throw three myths at you.
I’m supposed to bust them.
Yeah, you’re going to bust them three.
Yeah.
So the first myth about Network Cloud and this architecture in general is that it’s a one off, it’s just DriveNets and it’s just AT&T because
AT&T is the main customer and this is where it’s going to stop.
Okay, is that so?
Not really.
Well above AT&T.
AT&T is huge.
AT&T is over 50%.
That’s true.
But we also have customers based tier one customers based in India, based in
Japan, based in Europe.
We have the DDBR coming from TIP, which is kind of becoming a more predominant standard, and lots of operators are chimed into this.
So it definitely goes beyond AT&T.
Besides that, there are also alternatives.
So it’s not just DriveNets deploying DDCs, there are other solutions, it’s just that they are not as good as ours and that’s why you don’t hear about them.
But they do exist.
And actually in a recent report, I remember reading that out of the ten main SPs globally, four of them are already deployed DDC and four of them are in testing phase.
Correct.
It’s a big thing.
80% of the tier one market is yeah, quite big.
So this is the first myth, thank you for busting.
The second one is the operational headache, and specifically the fact that we take the back plane of the chassis and distribute it with all cables and connecting different boxes.
And there’s an operational fear that how do you approach this?
How do you troubleshoot this?
Okay, on the contrary, traditionally you would have a chassis, right, kind of a big black box.
Anything that goes wrong within the chassis, you’re dead in the water.
You don’t know what’s going on on the inside.
And it goes wrong.
Sometimes you enter a card and you.
One of the pins is bent.
Yeah.
One of pins is bent.
And the whole chassis goes, yeah, something.
Will go wrong because something will just go wrong.
Things happen.
So also in DDC things go wrong.
Absolutely.
But while in a chassis, you don’t have any ability to troubleshoot the insides of the chassis, right?
In a DDC you can all the interfaces are external, you have probes and indicators as to what’s going on between these interface points and therefore you can troubleshoot in a better way what’s going on in the insides of a DDC because it’s a fact outside.
So while in a chassis, you can’t go into the back plane and fix maybe a single connection that went bad you have to replace all the chassis
Here.
You have visibility to the fabric and the chassis, and you can pretty much troubleshoot.
Just because you close your eyes doesn’t mean that the problems go away here.
You don’t close your eyes.
Okay, great.
And the last thing is that there are lots of boxes, and it’s a fairly complex architecture, at least in terms of the number of elements in a single entity or a single cluster.
And you will probably need more people.
People are talking about adding full time employees in order to handle this complexity.
Well, actually, also in this case, quite the opposite.
You can solve one big problem, and that takes a lot of expertise, and you can break this problem into a lot of many identical, small problems.
This is how you automate.
You can automate a lot of many small problems.
But automating one big, huge problem is a bigger challenge.
And the example familiar.
Yeah, because you heard it before, because this is exactly what the hyperscalers have done going into building these huge facilities, data centers.
They say they automate everything, they normalized everything into something whichis replicated in many, many times, and then apply automation onto this.
And this is how you get to four engineers managing a data center of 100,000 servers.
And wow.
How is that possible?
So, actually, less FTE than… A lot less FTE.
A lot less FTE.
Okay, so we promised three myths.
Three myths.
Busted.
And thank you very much.
Run for busting.
Thank you for watching.
Stay tuned for additional episodes of season three.
See you later.
Bye.