The Open Source Advantage: Maximizing Data Center Efficiency Through Disaggregation - Part 2

Kei: I'll summarize this into two key points.

The first key point is the Pay-As-You-Go model. When you look at Data Centers or Central Offices, power, cooling, and space are crucial considerations beyond the technical design of the hardware itself. With the Pay-As-You-Go model, especially in open disaggregated systems, devices are typically one RU or two RU, not large chassis. This allows you to build infrastructure incrementally. For example, you can start with a manageable scale and easily expand as your user base grows from hundreds to thousands without altering your existing infrastructure. This scalability is a significant financial benefit.

The second key point is the distinction between CapEx and OpEx. For CapEx, using off-the-shelf components rather than proprietary ASICs reduces costs while maintaining performance. The economies of scale from leveraging merchant silicon allow us to build devices at a lower cost, which is why the open disaggregated model is gaining momentum, even among large industry players. Merchant silicon has advanced significantly over the past decade, matching many of the features of proprietary ASIC designs.

For OpEx, in a closed, vendor-locked model, you typically have to buy hardware, bundled software, and a service support contract from the same vendor. This lock-in means you can only purchase service contracts from that vendor, often at a higher cost. In an open disaggregated model, hardware and software are decoupled, reducing service contract costs. As you mentioned, Barry, this allows companies like IPI to act as system integrators, providing a one-stop shop for end customers, which significantly lowers maintenance and operational costs.

Lastly, from my experience, financial decisions often drive technical decisions. If a solution makes financial sense, it will eventually be adopted. I've noticed that CTOs often report to CFOs, underscoring the importance of financial considerations in technical decisions.

Kei: Sure. We actually have some real case customers we are working with, both here and also in Europe. These are pretty large carrier providers. The cost savings actually came in two parts by moving into the open disaggregated model.

We can preserve the scalability because of the merchant silicon solution. I'll give out some numbers in a second. The CapEx savings have gone down quite a lot, but that's not the end of the story. As we talked about a second ago, using the open platform with the hardware and decoupling the software means the traditional bundled service contract concept has gone away. So the savings are not only on CapEx, but also on OpEx.

For CapEx, you pay for it and maybe do a straight-line depreciation for X number of years. But OpEx, you don't depreciate. You actually have to pay for it like electricity in your house. You have to keep paying over and over, year after year. So that actually is a very significant cost-saving model in terms of ongoing expenses. A lot of these companies do depreciation - I see anything starting from four or five years all the way up to seven or even 10 years depreciation. So when your hardware has gone down to zero value, if you keep running it because it still meets your business requirements, you still have to pay for the maintenance, the service support, and all these other things. Our open disaggregated model has reduced both sides significantly.

One other thing I want to point out and share: when we started this business, we built a lot of devices using 16 nanometer merchant silicon. Then it went down to seven. And right now, as you and I are talking this morning, we are building the latest generation with five nanometer technology.

Now, to the end user, what does this smaller nanometer mean? To summarize in plain English, it means two things in terms of cost benefit:

1. Because the gap in transistor design on the wafer becomes smaller and smaller from 16nm to 7nm and now to 5nm, we can fit a lot more gates - all the different logic gates - into the wafer. What that means to you as an end user is you can expect a lot higher computing processing power on the same surface area chip design.
2. The smaller the nanometer, the more power saving on the device. Now, I want to be careful - more power saving doesn't mean the switch itself has lower power supply usage. What it means is per megabyte of processing or per 400G port, the power consumed has gone down using a 5nm design compared to a 16nm design.

So these benefits are built into the hardware we're developing, and all these cost benefits go back to the end user who's leveraging this technology.

Kei: Before I answer the seven-year question, I've actually seen open networking come a long way in the last few years. That's why you see OCP, TIP, and all these open foundations every year. When I present at OCP, I see more and more people attending, even during the pandemic with people coming online. So it's certainly catching up with a lot of momentum.

To answer your question, where I see this in seven years:

1. The technology is becoming more mature. I want to emphasize technology in the sense of both hardware and peripherals. This includes merchant silicon, thermal design, more intelligent temperature control, and things like liquid cooling. These advancements have driven a lot of momentum and partnerships with companies like yours.
2. . We continue to see a lot of software features become more integrated into our open-source platform.

So in seven years, or even five years, or even three years, Barry, I see the momentum continuing to build. I think it's a very exciting time to be in this field.

Lastly, I think customers see the benefit. I want to emphasize one point I said earlier: I observe that financial decisions drive technical decisions. So the last thing I want to leave with the audience is this: if open networking makes technical sense from both an OpEx and CapEx perspective, eventually all these things will catch up from a deployment perspective.