DriveNets said on Friday that its Network Cloud software is the first on the market to support the distributed disaggregated chassis (DDC) model.
DriveNets made its announcement during a presentation at the Open Compute Project's regional summit Friday morning in Amsterdam. Also on Friday, AT&T put its specifications for the DDC white box architecture into the Open Compute Project. AT&T said it would provide additional information on the deployment or trials of its DDC white boxes in the near future.
While AT&T has to say which vendors its working with on the DDC model, DriveNets seems to be a at least one likely candidate.
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Israel-based DriveNets emerged from stealth mode in February with $110 million in Series A funding, and announced additional funding in July.
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In April, DriveNets announced its 400G virtual router was being tested and certified by an unnamed Tier 1 telco. In Friday's press release, DriveNets said Network Cloud was in proof-of-concept trials with Tier 1 providers.
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. Network Cloud uses cloud-native routing software to support new functions in the underlying white-box hardware.
Like AT&T's white box DDC devices, DriveNets' routing software supports a packet-forwarding white box based on Broadcom's Jericho2 chipset, which has port interfaces for both 100G and 400G for performance up to 768Tb, which it says is the highest capacity router on the market.
"Broadcom's Jericho2 programmable ASIC combined with DriveNets' Network Cloud software and ODM white boxes, enable service providers a clear path towards fully-disaggregated router platforms," said Broadcom's Oozie Parizer, senior director of marketing of the switch products division, in a statement. "Based on the distributed disaggregated chassis design recently submitted to OCP, these platforms deliver significant capex and opex savings for next generation edge and core networks, while providing the required scale and features needed for large-scale network deployment."
By taking cloud features to the network, instead of vice versa, Network Cloud can run 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.