Season 4 Ep 4: Comparing the industry’s leading scheduled fabrics

Hi and welcome back to CloudNets-AI, where networks meet cloud.

And today we’re going to talk again about AI Networking Fabric and specifically about something

Arista launched just the other day, the DES, the Distributed Etherlink Switch.

And we have our Arista expert here, Yossi, thank you for joining.

Thanks for having me.

So Yossi, the DES sounds a lot like our DDC.

What is it?

What is the difference?

Okay, so let me take a broader view if I may.

Arista did launch their DES solution, the Distributed Etherlink Switch, which is essentially an end to end VOQ system.

You can call it a large scale chassis.

Right?

That’s what it is, it’s a fully scheduled fabric.

Now if you look at other companies that are competing in this AI networking market, like Cisco for instance, they also launched something they call the DSF, which is Distributed Scheduled Fabric.

And again, same thing here, Arista is doing it with some specific vendor chipset and Cisco is doing it with their own chipset, the Silicon One.

Right.

So basically DDC, DSF, DES, same thing.

It’s a different terminology for the same approach, let’s put it this way.

And the approach is basically saying we should put as much logic as we can on the switch side.

Right?

So the switch will handle all the congestion control, it will handle all the reordering of packets, it will handle the load balancing of packets, which are all necessary things when you’re talking about AI networking.

Okay, so basically we have a scheduled fabric.

So from DDC they have the distributed and they add the chassis, not so much the disaggregated.

Because their solution is monolithic from that black box.

Yeah.

Okay, so why choose DriveNets DDC over those solutions?

What do we have, that they do not have today?

Okay, so first thing first, we have the extra D, which means we are

Disaggregated.

Right?

DriveNets is a software company.

We do not manufacture or design hardware.

We work with multiple ODMs that are out there.

And so no vendor lock, the freedom.

Exactly.

No vendor lock.

Not in the optic side, not in the whitebox side.

We completely disaggregated.

The second thing is production experience DriveNets has been running these systems, the DDC/DES/DSF in production networks of some of the biggest service providers, T1 service providers there are that are out there in the last, I would say seven years.

Okay, right.

And also in hyperscalers that are running workloads.

You got it.

In the past year and a half we have gained tremendous experience with AI networks, specifically with Tier 1 OTT or hyperscale companies.

You’re right.

In production environments, this is very important.

And third thing I want to ask you is.

Okay, so at the bottom line, what do you say about DES?

I would say it’s a great solution.

Same goes for Cisco, by the way, the DSF.

So yeah, it’s a great concept.

Yeah, the concept is right

and we encourage it.

So, three things you need to know

about the latest development in AI networking or AI backend fabric.

One is that Arista has launched the DES, the Distributed Etherlink Switch, which is basically the same scheduled fabric concept as the DDC or the DSF or any other scheduled cell based fabric out there.

The second is that the difference between the DES and the DDC from DriveNets is (A) that we are disaggregated so you are not locked into a specific hardware or optic vendor.

The second is that the DDC from DriveNets actually works not only in service providers, but also in hyperscalers running AI workload.

And the third point is that it’s a great solution.

We do appreciate the industry endorsing this concept.

Cisco, Arista, I believe more to come and we think this is really the best solution for your AI training workload.

So thank you very much, Yossi, for this fascinating conversations and thank you for watching.

See you next time on CloudNets.