When you say distributed router fabrics, are you thinking OCP concept with interconnect switch with ATM-like cell relay (after flowery speeches about "not betting against Ethernet", or course)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_hyZwf6-Y0 https://www.ufispace.com/company/blog/what-is-a-distributed-disaggregated-chassis-ddc mostly advocated by Drivenets. It has been a while, but from what I remember, the argument, and it has a lot of merit, is you can scale to a lot bigger "chassis" than you could with any bigiron device. If you look at Broadcom latest interconnect specs https://www.broadcom.com/products/ethernet-connectivity/switching/stratadnx/bcm88920, you can build a pretty big Pops, and while they are trying to appeal mostly to AI cluster crowd, one could build aggregation services with that, or something smaller and you get incremental scaling and possibly higher availability, since everything is separated and you could even get enough RPs for proper consensus. I admit, I have never seen it outside of lab environment, but AT&T appears to like it. Plus all the mechanics of getting through your fabric are still handled by the vendor and you manage it like a single node. One could argue that with chassis systems, you can still scale incrementally, use different line card ports for access and aggregation and your leaf/interconnect is purely electrical, so you are not spending money on optics, so it does not exactly invalidate chassis setup and that is why every big vendor will sell you both, especially if you are not of AT&T scale. There is of course the other design with normal Ethernet fabrics based on Fat Tree or some other topology with all the normal protocols between the devices, but then you are in charge of setting up, traffic engineering and scaling those protocols. IETF has done interesting things with these scaling ideas and some vendors may have even implemented them to the point that they work. :) But "too many devices" argument starts creeping in. Yan On Fri, Dec 20, 2024 at 5:43 PM Mike Hammett <na...@ics-il.net> wrote: > I've noticed that the whitebox hardware vendors are pushing distributed > router fabrics, where you can keep buying pizza boxes and hooking them into > a larger and larger fabric. Obviously, at some point, buying a big chassis > makes more sense. Does it make sense building up to that point? What are > your thoughts on that direction? > > > > ----- > Mike Hammett > [ http://www.ics-il.com/ | Intelligent Computing Solutions ] > [ https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL ] [ > https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb ] [ > https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions ] [ > https://twitter.com/ICSIL ] > [ http://www.midwest-ix.com/ | Midwest Internet Exchange ] > [ https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix ] [ > https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange ] [ > https://twitter.com/mdwestix ] > [ http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/ | The Brothers WISP ] > [ https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp ] [ > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg ] >
