Special vs Custom vs Standard? Choosing the Building Blocks-10

Continuing from last week, let us talk about one of the things that the web-scale organizations have been driving very very hard. Their goals are clear.

• Lower Power
• Lower Footprint
• Simplified Architecture – Flat Architecture
  • de-layering
  • dis-aggregation
• Standardization
• Simplified management

Staircase FEC is the first and you can read more about this at this Link. We never really had a mid span meet for the DWDM. DWDM was book-ended, i.e. we must have transponders or colour cards from same vendor on both sides of link. This posed a great big problem and restricted the choice of vendors and was an opposite of “Disaggregation”. They have attacked this space and over last few years made great progress, with multiple vendors now adopting this standard and making components available to support this architecture. This moves away from custom and special and moves into the domain of Standard. You see, they succeeded where carriers have failed for so many years. The web-scale understand the value of disaggregation and drive it passionately. This single step has made 100G optics cheaper than ever and have created new power and space profile. You see when you strip of the bells and whistles and  come up with a bare bones compatible design it means Lower Capex and Lower Opex.

Next week I will talk about a technology that they are driving for 400G. So stay tuned!