NFD24 - DriveNets

Recently I had the privilege to attend NFD 24 in which DriveNets presented. I had never heard of them until this event. Which I am shaming myself for because they are doing some amazing things around transforming the network market.

One of the primary things that caught my attention was around what they are doing by disaggregating network functions. This is something that I have experienced in some capacity or another over the past few years. And when I understood what they were doing, I was immediately interested.

They have two products in which I will touch on in this post. One being DNOS and the other is DNOR.

DNOS - DriveNets Network Operating System

DNOS is a fully featured networking stack that runs on servers and white boxes. DNOS leverages many cloud and virtualization technologies to make this a fully distributed OS running as Docker containers in your network. DNOS separates the data plane on a cluster of white boxes and the control plane on any environment supporting containers. Therefore, disaggregating the data and control plane for massive scale.

DNOR - DriveNets Network Orchestrator

DNOR is an orchestrator in which automates the deployment, scaling and management of the DriveNets Cloud solution. Therefore accelerating the deployment of cloud-native networks.

Because of these automated operations provided by DNOR, life-cycle management of things such as: Zero-touch provisioning, modular software orchestration, and scale-up and scale-down are operationalized. Providing benefits such as: shorter maintenance windows, simplified operations, and improved reliability.

Another benefit of DNOR is complete visibility of your network. This means that such things as: cluster views, availability, and performance within hardware and software is visible. In turn, this assists in troubleshooting issues faster and ensuring that network performance and availability are proactively monitored.

Target Audience

From what I gathered at this point, it appears that service providers are the target audience for DriveNets. With that being said, AT&T became the first in the industry to implement DriveNets disaggregated core routing platform. This is obviously a huge win for DriveNets, and they definitely did a great job highlighting this during their presentation. Huge props to the DriveNets team on this for sure.

Conclusion

Although I have only highlighted two of DriveNets products here, I plan on digging more into their products more in depth as time permits. As I mentioned at the start of this post, I’ve been exposed to a few implementations over the past several years where DriveNets would have been a game changer. So, I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on what they are doing over time.

DISCLAIMER: I have been invited to Network Field Day Exclusive by Gestalt IT who paid for travel, hotel, meals and transportation. I did not receive any compensation to attend NFD and I am under no obligation whatsoever to write any content related to NFD. The contents of these blog posts represent my personal opinions about the products and solutions presented during NFD.