{"id":6971,"date":"2020-01-21T11:41:38","date_gmt":"2020-01-21T11:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/?p=6971"},"modified":"2024-04-24T06:46:47","modified_gmt":"2024-04-24T06:46:47","slug":"youve-got-to-know-disco-to-make-the-right-moves-in-networking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/youve-got-to-know-disco-to-make-the-right-moves-in-networking\/","title":{"rendered":"You\u2019ve got to know DISCO to make the right moves in Networking!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Now that I have your attention, let me assure you that you don\u2019t need to dust off your glittering shirts or bellbottomed trousers from the attic and step on the dance floor. Any references or similarities to the dance subculture that swept through the 70s are purely coincidental and at best an attempt at showing off some inspired wordplay. With that disclaimer out of the way, let\u2019s get down to understanding what DISCO means in this context and how it can help you make all the right moves in the world of Networking.<\/p>\n

It is quite well known that there is a transformation afoot in the Networking industry that has been a long time coming. In fact, it has been estimated that 70% of large and mid-sized enterprises are likely to rework their networking setups over the next three years.<\/a> Given this context, it is important to understand the drivers of this change \u2013 Disaggregation, Intent Based Networking, SDWAN, Containerization and Orchestration. Or DISCO \u2013 I told you it all adds up.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to touch upon each of these elements in a two-part blog. I shall cover Disaggregation and IBN below and you can go through the remaining three elements in part two.<\/p>\n

Disaggregation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Disaggregation of compute systems is a pretty old phenomenon. When I started my career in the year 2000, our infrastructure largely comprised of integrated hardware and operating systems such as HP-UX, Sun-Solaris and so on. However, this changed rather quickly and we soon had servers which could support several flavors of Linux, allowing users to choose an OS they preferred.<\/p>\n

Like most other things, Networking took a while to latch on to this very concept but I remember back in 2013 when Cumulus Networks started using this term.<\/p>\n

Soon after, Disaggregation started gathering more momentum with the development of programmable silicon from companies like Barefoot, Cavium and Innovium along with the emergence and acceptance of standardized interfaces through SAI (Switch Abstraction Interface) developed by the efforts of various members from the Open Compute Project.\u00a0 These silicones allow a fully programmable Dataplane, that can be updated in real-time, using a combination of Dataplane programming frameworks like DPDK, Domain specific language like P4 with components like P4 Runtime or SDKs implementing the SAI APIs.<\/p>\n

The advantages offered by Disaggregation are quite apparent \u2013 prevention of vendor lock-in, low cost commodity hardware & extreme flexibility. But like someone once said, there are no free lunches and these advantages come with additional investment in engineering talent to manage and support the disaggregation. However, in the hybrid cloud world, the biggest advantage that Disaggregation can offer is the ability to have a single unified network software workload, that you can run on your own hardware in a private or public cloud.<\/p>\n

Some of the key leaders who have contributed to Disaggregation are Edge-Core, DELL, Arista Networks, Cisco, Facebook, Microsoft, Barefoot, Broadcom, Centec, AT&T and IPInfusion thus ushering an era of branded white box disaggregation deployments. Here are some examples:<\/p>\n