Network Disaggregation – The holy grail?

Tl;DR: Yes

The networking industry has seen more innovation in the last decade than in the last 30 years. The popularization of the SDN concept and the release of OpenFlow 1.0 pretty much ignited a flame present in every operator’s mind: the fear of vendor lock-in.

It was common for operators to solely rely on a single vendor every time a new feature was need: let’s say, Joe has decided your network now needs to be monitored using a specific monitoring protocol, xFlow, for illustration, then, because you only use vendor A gear you would have to convince request your vendor to add that feature to your software stack. Your sales engineer would then have to convince his developers that this is a critical feature and then that feature would have to go through the full Q&A hardening pipeline in order to make sure it doesn’t break any of the 400 protocols present in the OS of your network. That process easily took years. It still takes a few years for the unfortunate souls that choose to be locked into a specific vendor.

OpenFlow became popular as a promise to bring innovation to the industry and solve the multi-vendor integration problem by providing a standard interface for programming the network. As I mentioned in my last post, while it has brought innovation to the industry, for a lack of a strong standardization process, it failed to achieve vendor integration, and the demand for an escape route from vendor lock-in remained.

 In 2011, a few smart minds in the industry ( Facebook, Arista, Rackspace ) started the Open Compute Project as an initiative to open hardware design, having in mind that there’s already so much innovation in the software layer of computation. Quickly the idea expanded to networking gear and a trend of disaggregation between NOS (networking operating system) and hardware started. Hardware vendors such as Broadcom and Mellanox started working on their own abstraction for hardware programming interface, and that abstraction layer allowed a lot of good innovation and that’s where the OpenNetworking concept started.

Having established a common interface to interact with the hardware, several NOS vendors have come up and in fact disaggregated the network. This naturally allows for faster development cycles since it decouples software development cycles from hardware development cycles, the NOS vendors focus on software instead of hardware specificities, it allows for a diversity of vendors, increasing the speed of innovation.

Let me give you a couple examples: Say, you convinced your manager to buy Open Networking gear based on Broadcom chips (for example) and you went for a “traditional” vendor, say, Dell, 3 years later, Broadcom comes up with a next generation chip, you could (1) choose to keep using Dell and upgrade the gear with no need to change any management systems. Alternatively, (2) let’s say Dell features didn’t keep up with your expectations, then you could replace it with Arista, or even Cumulus Linux in order to experiment with completely new paradigms and finally deploy xFlow. On another scenario, let’s say Mellanox next generation hardware performs much better, then you could again choose to keep using Dell OS and smoothly upgrade your hardware for an optimal cost.

Traditionally, vendor lock-in makes you pay for decades for a non-optimal decision, network disaggregation makes your decisions lighter, allowing you to quickly rethink your strategy and cheaply pivot if necessary.

Choice is extremely powerful, in college, I remember being amazed by the power of MIMO communications. Embracing path diversity and the ability to “choose” the best path just almost linearly increases the capacity of a channel. Network disaggregation gives you the same power, the power of choice.

Now, let me approach a few misconceptions I’ve seen around:

• Is network disaggregation SDN?  No.
• Can SDN be achieved through network disaggregation? Yes, ultimately network disaggregation accelerates innovation.
• Does OpenFlow effectively locks you to a vendor?

That’s a good one and I’m going to answer this on a next post.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to me with any questions.