DriveNets Discusses Network Disaggregation with Packet Pushers

Drivenets: Yes of course so originally the company was actually established to help CSPs shift their network business model so they can actually overcome their increasing challenges and meet future business needs. The entire product was inspired by the hyperscalers model, which they actually provided all kinds of answers to their unique business environments and their challenging requirements that their industry is facing. If you think about it what’s the major challenge that any service provider has today, that’s network capacity scaling. The growth is actually driven by all kinds of streaming and content-driven applications that we all know of today. This is 5G, IoT and everything is really leading to like a giant growth of capacity demands. I would say about 50 to 100 percent core, year over year. Now networks in the last 30 years probably hasn’t changed much, it’s just been built by larger chassis that grow bigger and bigger and being replaced every three to five years, but there’s nothing new there. It’s just that the costs are higher and those operators or service providers just need to pay or spend extra money every time there’s growth of capacity and that’s not a viable solution anymore. I mean the cost of the network scales up with the actual demand. You need to find an alternate solution or really simplify the network operation. You have both opex and capex that doesn’t scale linearly with the network.

Drivenets : Yes exactly you need to create some kind of a model which is distributed and disaggregated network elements that looks like a single chassis or a single router for the operator, but the entire Opex, the TCO, the Capex that they have for the product itself is much simpler. It meets their needs and it actually brings additional value for their future needs. It could also be value-added services and those are new opportunities for them.

Drivenets: Yes exactly, the solution itself, the product is based on two white boxes. One of them would be fabric similar to the monolithic chassis and the other one would be similar to a line card. Using those two white boxes you can actually scale from a single line card which is four terabits up to almost 768 terabits which is the largest cluster that we have, with the same type of white box. You don’t need all those types of different routers, different hardware, different components for various use cases in the network, you can use just a single type of log account for all use cases.

Drivenets: Yes exactly, in disaggregation there’s actually various levels of disaggregation. The first one is what you mentioned about hardware naturally you desegregate software from hardware. Now that’s not new, I mean it exists in the world for several years it’s been done in mostly in the hyperscalers in x86 environments but when you’re talking about service providers the scale and performance needs to be much higher that’s in terms of the hardware versus software. When you’re talking about disaggregating the software then you’re separating the control plan from the data plane. I mean we’re using x86 off the shelf servers to run our software on top of that which is container-based similar to the hyperscalers approach and we’re running on the actual white boxes we’re running containers which their main function is actually to run the data plane features if you take as an example quality-of-service, access-for-security and those kind of things.

Drivenets: Yes exactly. Now if you think about it we we spoke about what’s the main challenge that they have today, which is mostly the network capacity growth. I think this one actually relates to three main topics that they have to deal with or three main issues that they have. First off, the installation that they have today in the network has very low resource utilization. It’s actually their network is segmented to all kinds of dedicated physical network sections per type of service. If you think about it mobile, broadband, enterprise each one of them has its own segmented network using different types of routers and not a single white box or a single vendor that supplies for all different use cases. That’s the first one. The second one is the complexity multiple networks, multiple types of use cases, the operation complexity is huge there’s different types of router types, software releases, hundreds of actual components for each one of those routers you need to have a different type of fan unit or PSU which means you need to store them in inventory and you need to save them for spare parts. Lastly it’s high cost model, the entire model that they have today both from capex and opex perspective as we mentioned just scales up linearly.

Drivenets: Yes exactly if you want to support the disegregated model you have to have some kind of a separation of software both on the control plane and the data plan because you want to run their compute resources externally on x86 dedicated or actually off the shelf server and you want to have the white boxes act as single entities that can run their own use cases.

Drivenets: So that’s a very good question. I think that’s one of the questions the operators or customers always ask us how would they actually deal with that new network because they don’t really have a green field. So our suggestion always is to use some kind of a migration path. We install in parallel our solution, our clusters and if you think about it in most of the service providers today most of the network or if you actually bundle the entire capacity in the network, it doesn’t even reach a single cluster that we provide. It means when you install our solution you start taking over the new growth in the network and slowly merge what you mentioned as legacy router or legacy use cases merging to the new network. Within let’s say a year or two you’re pretty much done with the old network and you moved everything to the new network which is less equipment. It could be large clusters that handle the entire capacity of the network.

Adding one more thing to that is the beauty of the fact that maybe it’s not a new problem. As you go out and buy a very new incumbent vendor a very large router and you had an old one they’re not speaking to one another so you faced with that problem as well. Your migration plan, your move toward how do I build a new network which is one of top of another one a side of another will always be there when you juju when you do giant leaps in technology.

Drivenets : Yeah I think I mean maybe can add some shed some light about how we actually support value-added services in our architecture.Yeah so first of all the fact and we’ll speak about it when we’re speaking about software architecture the fact that we’ve completely disaggregated control from the data plane gave them a few benefits that they never had before even before value-added services. If you speak about what a service provider needs to do in order to enrich his own offering would be mainly to go into the control plane and add functionality. When you’re doing it on top of a chassis you’re going you’re going and touching the device itself when we took the control plane out, first of all here you have a very nice room of innovation in which you can update this control plane with without touching any hardware. You’re upgrading a VM, you’re upgrading the Docker container, it’s a much easier approach than you ever seen before. Again when we’ll speak about software architecture our view is not having yet another network operating system, but but having a virtualization layer over, the white box is a virtualization layer over the compute and now when we look at it the this exact way we open up a very a nice new field if I have a DDOS mitigation which I want to do maybe part of it could be on what we call the line card, the white box ,maybe part of it can run on our control and it’s much closer to the networking environment. If someone is going to do a 5G application which needs to be very very low in terms of delay or jitter we can run his Docker container on top of our architecture. For sure looking into the future looking into hybrid clouds where a service provider can offer not only services in their big central offices but also at small central offices, this is a great room for innovation.

Drivenets : I think there’s two layers to what you ask. First of all you describe it completely correct. One is now the price you have to pay in order to bring new features into the system is much lower you’re not going into an upgrade a complete full software upgrade of a very large chassis you can upgrade this exact Docker container which gives you a whole new world of how do you patch do you do patch management in operational environment. So exactly as you said I think the most beautiful thing in the way that we’ve solved it, wasn’t looking at something like Cisco’s IOS XR or Juniper Junos and saying this is the way a NOS should be built, but to a very large extent looking at how web applications are being built today and they’re very resilient they’re very highly available. They just solved the problem in a completely different way.

Drivenets: At least for the beginning, try to visualize a chassis, and visualize a standalone box and ask yourself one very important question is there any difference do I as a software vendor really want to see a difference between how I operate my software on a 16 line card router or a single line card router. For us it came into mind very early that we absolutely do not want to see any difference we want to see the exact same software stack functioning the same. So the way to vision it is now a line card this might just might be a logical function it’s a card that does forwarding, if it’s a standalone box on the same standalone box I have an ASICs that does forwarding. The same exact problem, my control plane running BGP running ISAS running OSPF or traffic engineering protocol, it can run on an RP, if it was a chassis, it can run on box if it was a standalone box. It can run on both if I have a very large cluster I have BGP running on the server and I have the line card functionality doing the forwarding. So from our perspective the beauty was to solve it the exact same way.

Drivenets: Completely correct. When drivel when DriveNets originally started we’ve been building a lot of VNF’s, a lot of virtual network function. We’ve built our own layers of forwarding and today we keep the exact same interfaces. My solution running over a native x86 and running over an ASICs would look exactly the same. Essentially the way that we measure how good our design is the way we measure how flexibility is by the ability to go between platform going between ASICs, doing exactly what you said, I think this is the beauty of the solution, this is how we should be measured.

Drivenets: We mean first of all that we started from looking at the problem as a microservice based one I’m not doing a line card I’m doing a forwarding service whether this forwarding service reside on an ASIC whether it reside on an x86 it doesn’t it doesn’t matter it has a functionality of forwarding packets and I need to look at it as an orchestration problem. If i’ll take you back to the problem of a router we’ll take a protocol, like LACP for example, this protocol controls a single port. I don’t need to run it on the server. I need to know that this protocol is relevant at an exact point which is in our case the white box.

Drivenets: Exactly, but if you look at the inherent problem, it’s an orchestration problem. Where do I put the service so it’s best fitted into the function it needs to serve and this is cloud native, meaning it’s much more than running a Docker container, but having the intelligent to put the Docker container at the right place to optimize from a system perspective what we’re trying to achieve.

I think you mentioned something which is quite important the latency impact. If you remember there was for several years everyone’s been talking mostly the telco providers about SDN and how SDN will change their life because they want to adopt what they saw in hyperscalers but the latency actually killed it. You can’t really put something which is I would say RSBP fast read out orchestrator or controller externally out of your network I mean the network has to be on-prem and something has to control it locally so you can have fast real capability.

Drivenets : Exactly that’s why SDN kind of moved most of the orchestration features which could react at the later phase. We kept all the local capabilities on the actual x86 on-prem on the cluster itself.

Drivenets : So essentially we can do both. Usually when we’re looking and speaking with our customers from DriveNets perspective you can run your own control plane wherever you want but if you look into sense and you’re looking where in where would be the right place to put it we need to remember that there is interaction between the control plane and data plane eventually a BGP packet coming from a line card from a white box going into my control plane needs to traverse some networking environment until the point they reach the protocol and handle it. So from a customer perspective it would be beneficial to minimize this delay so in this case you can call it on-prem. But another benefit that we bring into the service provider market is now it doesn’t have to reside in the same room which is also a leap forward I can have my control plane running in a “ IT environment” on very strong servers residing within dedicated servers rack and the rest of the white boxes boxes in the telco space. So I get low delay, but I also get the benefit of handling the function in the right place.

Drivenets: Exactly. Yeah open, doesn’t have to say you win the chassis, you might be in the room or in the floor [Laughter].

Drivenets: So we’re completely open in regard to that first of all exactly as you said, we have a very strong abstraction layer nowhere inside of our architecture until the point we’re really at we’re at a really low level of the white box do we translate to any ASIC format in broadcom case it’s only very low our architecture that we translate from the DriveNets “ language” to a Broadcom language the rest of the system is completely model driven meaning that we’ve defined DriveNets yangs in a strong in a strong community with the open compute project and essentially we speak at the DriveNets language we program a queue we program an acl we program a route but only at a later stage would we translate it into ASICs itself. So for us if someone brings in a new ASICs tomorrow and it’s good enough and it has all the capabilities that the service provider needs, great we will be more than willing to migrate it and test how fast we can do it.

Drivenets: Exactly

Drivenets : I heard was, you wanted to be in control of your own destiny, you didn’t want to be beholden to the ASIC providers and you wanted the flexibility. Is that a fair assumption

That is the first assumption but also, yes we wrote our own abstraction layer but the Yang modules where we can be standard where there’s an IEEE draft where there’s IETF draft where OpenConfig defines it, great, we want to be as standard as we can because we have the benefit of people adapting it much quicker and it works it’s just win-win situation for everyone. But in this industry you leave it as long, at least longer than not everything is standard, not always did we see a Yang module which defined correctly rsvp or traffic engineering or segment routing on or anything else that we’re trying to do.

Drivenets: It is exactly a non-standard, standard world.

Drivenets: Excellent so think of the API as kind of encompassing more than one thing. One form of API would be protocols standard one that we support in order to enrich the service provider environment with the ability to do a software defined networking so things like BGP link state which would give you the topology or PSAP in order to control your traffic engineering so these are standard APIs or protocol which lets you which lets you speak with the DriveNets platform and configure it, or provision, it a part of that of course things like netconf in order to do NETCONF configuration. But more than that we’ve developed a set of open apis which we expose to our customers both at the router level and at the orchestrator level that let you control the system from an orchestration perspective for example deploy the DriveNets software upgrade the DriveNets software get matrixes that you otherwise probably couldn’t out of the systems so we really enrich your environment in a way that let you automate over the DriveNets solution probably in a much better way that you could have done so far.

Drivenets: Exactly.

Drivenets: I think it’s a wonderful question and it should be a very simple answer. It should for you it should look exactly like programming any other router the fact that there’s 20 boxes there shouldn’t matter the fact that there’s 100 boxes there shouldn’t matter if you configure an ACL over a log bundle and that log bundle spends over 20 machines, why should you care it’s DriveNets problem to make it it’s DriveNets problem to make it look as seamless as we can to be done in a transactional way.

Drivenets: Well I think it’s it’s not that mystical if you think about it essentially what they have internally is just a management switch. Now we have the same power just disaggregated. We did our solution we have a dedicated switch and his sole purpose in life is to forward your API calls to all of the devices in the description and what Amir mentioned about having a transactional API is exactly the type of you would call magic that makes it happen right you forward those calls to all of the devices and they all immediately acknowledge that they accept the if it’s either a fee programming or a new configuration that they need to apply to all of the line cards at once. .

Drivenets: Yes yeah exactly

Drivenets: So if you think about it Amir talks about how do you actually program or configure a monolithic chassis. You just use CLI today I mean there’s not a lot of orchestration or external management system but within our solution if you think about it we brought to the table something that didn’t exist in the past when you insert the line card into the chassis it’s already there there’s a slot it’s numbered you just put the line card in and everything works as planned right there’s nothing special you need to do in the field it just goes live and you can start using that line card. In our solution when it’s disaggregated you have to connect it in some way to the disaggregated chassis and something needs to manage that platform and make it part of that cluster because otherwise it’s just another white box. So we actually introduced our we call it DNOR DriveNets Orchestration system and its purpose is to actually run the life cycle management of the product when you plug in a new white box it actually calls home what you would know as ZTP and it immediately gets the software gets validated. We know it’s part of DriveNets solution and it’s part of the cluster immediately. So from that point on deployment upgrades life cycle management and everything, it looks essentially like a single router.

Drivenets: Yes if you take a let’s take a service provider network usually in a lot of CO you would have two large routers just for redundancy perspective each one of them could have let’s say 16 line cards if you take our solution and try to put it on the same way same site you would have the same thing two clusters each one of them could be let’s say even up to 48 line cards and every line card that you want to connect to one of the clusters you just do use the orchestration system connect it to be virtually part of the chassis and you have two running routers at the same time.

Drivenets: It actually depends on the use case. If you take a look at the segments that you have in the network as a service provider it starts from the last mile to access maybe metro aggregation access and then peering and core network and the main difference other than the I would say pop of under the pop sites or the connectivity of the services is the scale. Usually if you talk about New York City naturally you’ll have large site area there with a lot of capacity and if you’re talking about some remote site in North America you’re going to have very low benefit capacity. So it’s up to you the provider to decide what’s the scale you want to use but the benefit here that you don’t have to pick and choose up font and then you stuck with it for five years and you have to do some kind of a forklift replacement. You can use the same line card which supports four terabit you can use it as a single line card just as a pizza box standalone box, and put it in some remote site if you want to move that exact box to New York because now you need another line card just move it there connect it virtually to the cluster and that’s it you’re done. So you can use the same solution in any site or in any location that you want, you don’t have to replace the entire cluster.

Drivenets: Yes think think about what happens today well everyone’s talking about Covid-19 right but think about what happens we are watching our netflix and youtube and we’re always streaming now we’re watching live from home now what really happens in those pops in those service providers from supporting 10 terabits in a single location suddenly they need to support 50 terabits in a single location and the only way to do it is start buying more chassis because they’re out of room and if you stack everything today and just add more and more and more bandwidth to the same cluster you don’t have an issue, just add those line calls.

Drivenets: So do people stand this up in like a a leaf spine sort of topology typically depending on what they’re trying to achieve.

Essentially the way to look at it from a physical standpoint is that you take the fabric white box you take the line card white box to say and you do put them in a CLOS formation but from that moment on when software is provisioned software is deployed this is one big router, and had you ripped open a chassis behind the scene this is a CLOS network as well.

Drivenets: But then once that is in place leaf spine presumably you know limited or at least well-defined and understood over subscription between tiers and now now right I’ve got this a massive switch that I can do things with well, router, switch whatever we mean these days.

Let’s talk about money guys let’s talk about money so because service provider networks are notoriously expensive you know that’s those these are big dollar networks they’re they’re large they’re spidery they you know the bandwidth is expensive it’s all expensive and so how do you guys fit into this because cheap cheap to buy like I guess you’re saying that you’re fairly inexpensive to buy compared to a traditional model but does that also mean it’s cheap to operate because it doesn’t necessarily and to be fair some of this sounds it’s different and part of my brain’s going is this complicated is this more complicated to have you know an external leaf spine versus a collapsed chassis where it all tidally fits in the rack so anyway talk to us about money.

Drivenets: Yeah so when you take it take a look at the overall TCO, so our overall TCO is much cheaper than naturally what you have today in the incumbent vendors. Some parts of it is the operation, as you mentioned we’ll talk about it in a second, some part of it is naturally because of white boxes right because overall when you’re not dependent on a single vendor and there’s no vendor lock-in and you have other ODMs that they can reduce their costs and naturally there’s a competition in the market then the customer eventually wins right he gets he gets to pay less but let’s talk about operation I think that’s that’s a myth there’s a lot of telco providers and customers that’s the first friend that comes into mind mostly in engineering that says look it looks huge it looks complex it looks like we’re gonna need extra systems I don’t know if it works as a single router or 20 routers that now I need to operate in my network and our answers to them is: let’s take a look at the the bright side and let’s take a look at the entire solution and see what it actually brings to you or actually brings to the table and talking about the operational complexity.

If you take a look today on a chassis and you’re out of capacity and there’s let’s say 8 slots still and you need slot number nine there’s only two ways you can really solve the issue today one of them is go get another chassis and do forklift replacement. And forklift actually means forklift you need to bring a forklift to take out those gigantic chassis move them aside and bring something else in.Or the other way is to introduce a new router to your network which has is all entire our problems of introducing another node into your complex IGP or MPLS network. In our solution it’s just a white box it’s a pizza box it’s exactly as it sounds just insert another small pizza box into one of the racks in the room plug it in and that’s it you’re done so from complexity perspective you’re pretty much free 50% cheaper for not for the actual service provider but for the company that actually builds it for the service provider, they don’t need to bring the forklifts anymore that’s it. All they have to do is store it in some warehouse, send some guy in the middle of the night with just a simple pizza box, who can bring it in his car, open the the back door, put it in the rack and just insert it to one of the routers and that’s it.

Drivenets: They matter a lot. If you take a look at the chassis today it’s not really limited by the actual capacity that the chip can handle or the chassis that the vendor can manufacture has a limit. It’s actually the cooling and the power that they need if you have a huge chassis you actually the entire room is actually empty all you have is that gigantic chassis in the middle because there’s not enough power or not enough cooling in the room. I would say hyperscale or data center style, you just distribute those boxes around the room and you have enough cooling and enough power for the entire solution.

Drivenets: Exactly yeah from your point of view you see another line card in a virtual chassis you operated it you operated the way you always did you configure it the way you always did you get the same SysLog you get the same SNMP if you want to use old method you get streaming telemetry if you want to use new method but from your point of view this is a single entity this is the exact beauty of our design

Yeah but there is one key aspect here that you’re saying we need to match the legacy network as I mentioned saying like SNMP and CLI because you know how it is engineers. We want to be engineers we love the CLI I still use CLI because I love it you want to see the commands you want to see the output you know I want to see what’s going on everyone still loves CLI that’s not going to go away we still develop CLI but on the other hand when you want to match hyperscalers when you want to see what’s going on in the cloud networks you want to see orchestration if you want to have value-added services you want to see ddos you’re not going to do it with CLI and do some kind of a great package from internet it doesn’t work like that today you want to see orchestration system you want to have some kind of a marketplace where I click a button and the entire cluster just gets upgraded and that’s how it’s done today I mean that’s from operator perspective that’s mind-blowing they’re saying wow that’s a whole different way to actually manage a router today.

Drivenets: The vision I had when I was reading and prepping for the show was a duck paddling it looks like a duck on the top and underneath there’s all this stuff happening to keep the clusters going and bring together this ODM into it you know into a unified hull and I think it’s that’s that’s the trick here is to see this as a instead of it being a chassis it might be 20 30 40 ODM switches but it looks and operates like a chassis switch or a chassis router, chassis-based router.

Drivenets: Yeah I thought you’re going to say it looks like an operates it’s like a duck but.

Drivenets: Well each white box today is four terabits which is actually limited by the chip the silicon that the botcom supports today so it’s 4 terabit today and we support up to 48 of those so it’s 192 terabits which is much much more than what service provider needs today for a single router and it’s actually designed to support almost 800 terabits so there’s pretty much almost 200 line cards under the same router now admit it’s not in every corner in every co that the csp has right but keep in mind that the same box can be used anywhere using the same fabric and line card so you just buy one solution and place it whatever you want.

Drivenets: So today we actually have a deployment in one of our North American service provider. We’re working with pretty much all the big one T1 providers in the world because they all experience the same issue and the solution and the product is actually well accepted by all of them so within testing in several places and we all ready now.

Drivenets: Well essentially naturally you can contact us whether for your podcast. Everyone goes through LinkedIn or for our website where you have pretty much all the information you want to see. There’s an overview of our products solution. References for all the product webinars and various analyst reports. Those kind of things that actually talks about disaggregation and our solution that matches the future of IPs.

Drivenets: yeah exactly

Exactly and I think even one more comment here is the fact that if you’re a large service provider, you can look at the beauty of seeing it as software license and not as a perpetual license. You don’t grow your the payments you pay does not grow at the rate of you putting new routers new hardware we can go into a fixed model in which we will pay us a fixed amount of money year over year for a certain number of years it’s to begin with. No matter how large, no matter how steep would be the jump in your traffic, you would not jump in the payments you pay us.

Drivenets: Yeah I can tell you a story about what happened here in Israel a few years ago in the cellular industry I mean we paid a lot of money I think almost in the states about 80 dollars a month just for our cellular bill and some company came in and kind of broke the entire market and they offered something in 10 dollars. A year later everyone pays ten dollars and those providers they haven’t changed anything they still need to meet the demand so the solution for them would be the same thing they need to lower their opex and capex costs on the network.

Drivenets: yes that’s right

Drivenets: So our software and our entire architecture is completely compliant with a concept called DDC the distributed disaggregated chassis which was offered by AT&T and was accepted to the Open Compute Project and essentially the beauty about it is not only that it materializes this design for service providers, but it also brought it into reality in the fact that more than one ODM vendor took it and more than one ODM vendor was willing to create it and for us this opens a lot of possibilities lowering the price because there is more than one vendor but also from a service provider point of view they’re laying the ground here for a bigger thing running DriveNets and running other companies who would be willing to run in such architecture offering new services extending existing services. So from from overall perspective this is a a great move and OCP for us is important not only because of this specific hardware but also for other things which are important for cost. Optics we do not brand optics so any OCP compliant optic would be working here it will be certified it will be part of the solution so from the grand scheme of things this is lowering the cost in many many aspects.

Drivenets: That’s I think that’s what other vendors thought over the beginning.

Drivenets: You do know there’s a hidden command for every SFP to be running the network right that’s yes kind of the magic that happens in every vendor.

Drivenets: Exactly.

Drivenets : Okay so we’re talking about service provider right service providers unique market and it has its own demands it holds issues and there’s different segments within that market so we now we support today the call some of the aggregation and the peering functions or use cases within that market but we’re working to expand that to other sections within the market if you’re talking about Metro, Access, last mile those kind of segments within the same market. Now that’s one market naturally like any other company we’re trying to expand our market and our strategies to kind of focus on more use cases that you see today like 5G and IoT and mobile backcalling and all of them experience the similar issues of having to run disaggregated types of architectures and our software and orchestration really fits there very well so that’s two kind of main paths working on in parallel.

And of course important note here is the enterprise market you need a lot of ports you need a lot of interface here’s a great solution for data center interconnect or for your pod, for your super spine a lot of very other interesting elements that we’re going to tackle in the near future with very much the same offering.

You mentioned OCP by the way which is a good point there’s not a lot of vendors today which manufacture commodity chips or commodity hardware to support that white box model but we’re obviously working with the industry to expand that as part of our world map as well whether it’s new optics new white boxes new chips that’s going to come in the future with the vendors or the partners that we work with today that’s naturally part of our roadmap because there’s going to be new line cards new fabrics within a few years as well.

Drivenets: Yeah you can actually access our website www.drivenets.com you have the complete overview of our products solutions references to pretty much every podcast webinar various analyst reports on our solution or whether our customers how they see our products you can just log in take a look at what we offer there and there’s always ‘contact us’ if you have any more questions.