Market disruption and the explosion of bandwidth consumption are challenging SPs to scale up and increase agility whilst reducing costs. Challenged by major business disruption from web players and over-the-top providers, traditional SPs are looking at the strategies deployed by these competitors. One particular strategy that is of interest, is the migration to white box routers and network disaggregation to create what appears to be massively scalable, hyper agile, inexpensive networks. But is this the full picture? Let's take a closer look.
Over the last few months we have seen a flurry of announcements around router hardware and software disaggregation such as AT&T announcing that they plan to install more than 60,000 white box routers running their disaggregated Network Operating System (dNOS).
Cisco is at the forefront of this movement and top-level executives across the board have announced that some of our leading products will be available as disaggregated options.
Yvette Kanouff, SVP/GM Service Provider Business Unit, announced the disaggregation of Cisco IOS XR and the support for new and innovative consumption models.
Roland Acra, SVP Data Center Business Unit, announced support for the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) on our Nexus platforms allowing customers to run the Network Operating System (NOS) of their choice on our SAI-ready Nexus platforms.
Cisco made it possible for our customers to run NX-OS on third party hardware platforms.
IOS XR programmability was enhanced through two new APIs:
Both IOS XR and IOS XE support Application Hosting, enabling various Cisco and third party applications to be hosted in Linux containers (LXC).
The basic premise of router disaggregation is the decoupling of the NOS from the underlying hardware (seeFigure 1). This gives a customer the flexibility to source the NOS of their choice and match it with a white label hardware platform that fits their requirements. The ideal scenario is that the NOS operates as an application which can be installed on a wide range of supported Linux distributions. The white label hardware platform is expected to be Open Compute Project (OCP) compliant, supporting the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE). The OCP provides standardized interfaces and procedures to boot and run a 3rdparty NOS on a white box. With this model, the NOS is decoupled from the hardware, but customers are still bound to the NOS vendor to provide features, updates and innovation based on their roadmap.
Figure 1: Router Disaggregation ModelsThe next level of disaggregation is the de-layering of the NOS and exposing APIs at various levels, moving to an open and modular model. We've seen a lot of use cases typically associated with network disaggregation being solved in this manner. Let's take a look at the various layer groupings.
The disaggregated and modular models will create a lot of opportunities by driving openness, creating a larger ecosystem of vendors and open source projects that will accelerate innovation.
The flip side is that someone has to pull together and validate the router stack, integrate the software and hardware combinations that each SP will decide to deploy. In essence every combination of software with white label hardware becomes a new platform deployment. In some cases, it is expected that the NOS vendor will be responsible for certifying a set of OCP compliant white label boxes, while in other cases the task may need to be driven by the SP. The question of technical support and the triaging between the various vendors is also one of high interest. We will see how Cisco is stepping up in to solve these challenges later in the blog.
Let's take a look at the key benefits:
That's all great for Web players and their "no-legacy" infrastructures. But can Service Providers benefit from the promises of disaggregation? Looking at the typical SP network, the difficulty of the disaggregation challenge is quickly apparent. SP networks are complex environments with different domains and requirements (see Figure 3).
A lot of interest is seen in the access domain, especially in cell site routers, given the expected rollout of 5G services. At the time of writing, every major white box vendor (Accton, Agema, Dell, Edgecore, Quanta etc..) are focusing on building "pizza-style" single NPU, single rack unit boxes which seem to be a good fit at the cell-site. The scale of deployment is expected to be in the 10s of thousands of devices, promising cost-effective rollouts, but also creating interesting staging and deployment challenges.
In the aggregation domain, feature rich, high capacity and high availability solutions are needed to support the SP offerings of commercial as well as residential services. A few SPs are looking at disaggregated solutions in this space (see DT Access 4.0), requiring spine-leaf designs which are more akin to the data center architectures.
Moving on towards the core domain, we do not see yet any initiatives for disaggregation. The high capacity, density and cost efficiency profile of this domain makes the modular, multi-chassis integrated systems the clear choice for these locations.
Finally, the DC domain is the sweet spot of disaggregated routers, in TOR, spine and leaf roles. This is especially true in the web scale DCs, who have adopted the disaggregated model at scale.
Figure 3: Disaggregation in SP NetworksThe end to end deployment of solutions with disaggregated routers raises the question of who will be responsible for testing and validating the design, ensuring that the design will meet requirements and then committing to the timely rollout of the solution. Even more importantly, once in production, who will be responsible for optimizing it on an ongoing basis?
How can Cisco Services help you to achieve these benefits? We are working with all SPs considering disaggregation and already having conversations on how address some of their concerns and support their plans, especially as SPs are thinking to operationalize the disaggregated routers. Throughout these engagements, a few common concerns are surfacing, such as:
Today Cisco Services is ready to support engagements with disaggregated routers. Our goal is to provide the same high value Cisco customer experience to disaggregated router engagements as we do to our typical integrated router engagements. Our customers should not experience a difference. The complete services portfolio, from advisory, implementation, optimization, cloud managed services and technical support services has been reassessed in support of this goal.
Specifically:
Separating the software from the hardware and opening up the ecosystem promises significant benefits, both from an increased innovation and device cost optimization perspectives. But to achieve this, Service Providers want help putting the solution back together, managing the total cost of ownership, mitigating the risk associated with new platform introductions as well the ongoing technical support and optimization. This naturally extends to disaggregated systems, which will be widespread in our largest SP customers. Service Providers require a partner that has the experience, expertise, scale and financial stability to see this transition through.
With the largest and most complete network design and support capability in the world, Cisco is the only partner that is ready to operationalize your choice of white label box.
Learn more aboutCisco Services.
Blog contributors:Carlos Pignataro, Jeff Apcar, Steve Iatrou