Hi and welcome back to Cloud Nets, where networks meet cloud.
Today, we have a very, very boring topic: standardization, and because we talk
about standardization, we brought our not so standard expert -
Run. Expert on standardization.
Yeah, so standardization is important because especially in the disaggregated
world, when you take software and hardware from different vendors, you need to talk about the interconnect between those, the interfaces, and you need to standardize those,
just like you do in the mobile world where 3GPP defines standard
open interfaces and you can take different parts of the network from different vendors.
But how does it reflect in the network cloud world, Run?
Well, surprisingly, it breaks down to three pillars.
All right? As opposed to what, you know, the common thinking would be that disaggregation is, kind of, alluding into proprietary. It's not. It's actually open. First off, the standards, the definitions of the boxes are based on OCP certification. So when OCP certifies a device OCP is Open Compute Project. There is a committee. It's coming from the industry. It looks into
the specs, into the definitions, and it approves it. Whenever these items are being changed, the committee needs to kind of reconvene and reapprove it.
The conclusion to that is that the spec, the resulting spec is also open. Therefore, any hardware manufacturer that likes to kind of step in and provide these devices and build them already has a written spec, just download a spec and implement.
So that's item number one. And OCP created DDC, right?
Distributed Disaggregated Chassis.Exactly. And the example there was a spec coming from AT&T. They made the contribution. Obviously, it was reviewed by the entire committee and then published and now it's out and open. You can just Google it and you'll find DDC, AT&T, OCP. You will find the spec as is.And you can build your own DDC.
-Yeah, yeah.
Number two: the TIP, the Telecom Infra Project have kind of stepped into this this domain as well, and they made definitions as to what does... not a DDC, now it's called DDBR,
but essentially it's the same thing. What does it need to do in terms of routing functionality so that pool that set of functionality is as well defined as well as what are the interfaces of this device, this eventually resulting device, how does it interface to the management level, to the management plane or management devices, software that orchestrates the complete network?
So that's item number two.
Item number three - and what's interesting because both TIP and OCP have taken more of a practical approach into making these standards. Let's put it all in place. Let's get the inputs from the vendors as what they have already implemented, and let's practically build something
that works and then wrap around a standard on top of something which
is already working versus the previous, say method, that was kind of "let's define everything and then allow the industry to implement according to what is already fully
detailed and a lot more cumbersome".
You can say that's waterfall versus an agile approach, but when it's applied to standardization.
So the bottom line, in a nutshell, is that those industry bodies, TIP, OCP take a practical approach and define the architecture in order to avoid or overcome vendor control proprietary implementation of disaggregated systems.
-Exactly. That's the logic.
Thank you very much, Run.
Thank you for watching.
See you next time on Cloud Nets.