Season 3 Ep 10: DDC – the best of Chassis and Clos
Chassis or Clos? What about both?
From the perspective of scale, absolutely Clos topology outranks a chassis. From an operational standpoint, a Clos topology would mean that you will need to manage a lot of boxes and that’s a bigger headache than managing a single device, a chassis, one stop shop. But from a Capex standpoint, a Clos topology prevails over chassis. Looking at the alternative, Distributed Disaggregated Chassis (DDC), it takes the same scalability factor of a Clos, the operational aspects of a chassis and even when you look at the cost side of things, from an operational standpoint, DDC operates as a single device. Then from a Capex standpoint, DDC operates or works as white boxes.
Listen on your favorite podcast platform
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Full Transcript
Hi, and welcome back to CloudNets
where networks meet cloud and today we’re going to talk about something different
You know, chassis and Clos?
Which is better?
So and we have the ‘which is better expert’ ‘Run Clos’ who is no relation to the original one.
Let’s break it down
The chassis versus the Clos topology from the perspective of scale absolutely Clos topology outranks a chassis yeah, right, just easy enough Add tiers and fan out that’s easy to do from an operational standpoint, a Clos topology would mean that you will need to manage a lot of boxes okay?
That’s a bigger headache than managing a single device, a chassis, one stop shop, everything kind of boils down to one device.
Definitely from an operational standpoint,
It’s better to have less elements in your network not only from operational perspective, but also from the IGP convergence, from IGP routing protocols.
Yeah, the whole shebang.
That’s true.
And then when it comes to cost, On the operational expenditure, I’d say chassis
Again, one box to manage easier than managing thousands of From a Capex perspective, a Clos topology usually associates itself with white boxes which are coming from ODMs, meaning pay as you grow
pay as you grow as well and then you start from a lower price point.
So I would say from a Capex standpoint, a Clos topology would prevail against the chassis.
But outside of these three points, like scale and operational and cost let’s look at the alternative,
let’s look at DDC.
Oh, okay.
Because DDC takes the same scalability factor of a Clos, the same operational aspects of a chassis
and even when you look at the cost side of things, then again, from an operational standpoint, operates as a single device and from a Capex standpoint, it operates or works as white boxes.
So DDC kind of takes the best of both worlds when it comes to Clos versus chassis.
DDC wins
When you come think about it, it makes sense because DDC is actually taking a chassis and breaking it up to white boxes that are in a Clos architecture.
No coincidence there.
Yeah, no coincidence there.
It’s just both.
It’s simply put…both.
Okay, so this is interesting because we wanted to understand which is better, chassis or Clos.
And we came to the understanding that you do not have to choose because if you go DDC, you can have the scale of Clos and the operational efficiency, lower number of elements in the network, et cetera, of a chassis and the cost advantages of both.
So it’s a win win.
It’s a win win win and above everything, it gives you as a customer deploying this maximum control over what’s inserted into your network
Okay.
So I didn’t see this coming. Actually I did.
Thank you very much, Run,
Thank you for watching see you next time on CloudNets.
Bye bye.
