DriveNets says its 400G white box routing software is in testing with a Tier 1 telco

Israel-based DriveNets announced on Wednesday that its 400G virtual router was being tested and certified by an unnamed Tier 1 telco.

In what it claims is an industry first, DriveNets' Network Cloud software-based disaggregated router has added 400G-port routing support.

Network Cloud uses cloud-native routing software to support new functions in the underlying white-box hardware. DriveNets, which emerged from stealth mode in February with $110 million in series A funding, said the vision behind Network Cloud was to simplify and scale service providers' rollout of 5G and other new services,

DriveNets' routing software supports a packet-forwarding white box based on Broadcom's Jericho2 chipset, which has high-speed, high-density port interfaces of 100G and 400G.

According to DriveNets, Network Cloud is the only router on the market designed to scale 100/400G ports up to performance of 768Tb, which it says could form the highest capacity router on the market.

Borrowing a page from hyperscalers, Network Cloud runs the routing data plane on white-boxes and the control plane on standard servers, which separates the network cost from capacity growth. Network Cloud can run any network function as a microservice on the same distributed hardware infrastructure. Its cloud-native capabilities include zero touch provisioning, full life cycle management and automation as well as diagnostics.

"Unlike existing offerings, Network Cloud has built a disaggregated router from scratch. We adapted the data-center switching model behind the world's largest clouds to routing, at a carrier-grade level, to build the world's largest service providers' networks," said Ido Susan, CEO and co-founder of DriveNets, in a prepared statement.  "We are proud to show how DriveNets can rapidly and reliably deploy technological innovations at that scale."

In order to keep pace with increasing bandwidth demands due to video consumption and the low latencies that 5G will need, service providers, such as Verizon and AT&T, have been hot on the trail of 400G.

RELATED: AT&T's Fuetsch says AT&T now has internet white boxes in production

During his keynote address at the Open Networking Summit earlier this month, Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs and AT&T's chief technology officer, said in his keynote address that AT&T was preparing to go from 100G to 400G transport as part of its Open ROADM initiative.

"We will be upgrading to 400 gig," he said at the conference. "To our knowledge, it's another big first, not just for us, but for the industry."

When asked if AT&T was working with DriveNets for white box 400G routers an AT&T spokesman replied that there "was nothing to announce today."