AWS contributes edge gateway to Open Compute Project Foundation
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has contributed a specification for an edge gateway to the Open Compute Project. Through additional AWS contributions, this edge gateway will also support OCP’s Switch Abstraction Layer (SAI) and thus end users will have a choice of network OS including SONiC or DENT from the Linux Foundation.
This gateway specification is intended to be the catalyst for development of a new and resilient open enterprise edge computing supply chain, with wide participation from ODM and OEM network equipment vendors including Edgecore, Celestica, Delta Networks, Extreme Networks, Ragile Networks, Delta Electronics and Wistron. The expectation is that production prototypes will be available for display at the OCP Global Summit in October 2023, and that volume shipments will begin in 1Q 2024.
“We strongly welcome this development as it expands OCP’s multi-vendor open edge ecosystem to the enterprise market that will serve many geographies in EMEA, North America and APAC. This is aligned with several of OCP’s directions including: enabling movement of workloads to the edge, development of hardware and software that is hardware-aware under OCP’s hardware-software co-design strategy, and draws on OCP’s relationship with the Linux Foundation for increased collaboration on SONiC and DENT,” says George Tchaparian, CEO at the Open Compute Project Foundation.
The contributions from AWS of a new enterprise gateway specification and enhancements to OCP SAI complement OCP’s existing edge computing projects that have been focused on telecom and resulted in a multi-vendor ecosystem delivering OCP-recognised equipment for edge-located deployments including the Open Edge Server and several cell site gateways.
“Our increased engagement with the OCP is in line with AWS strategy to foster a vendor agnostic supply chain for edge hardware that can be deployed in Just Walk Out technology locations, as well as other environments,” says Michael Lane, principal technical program manager at AWS.
The enterprise edge gateway as specified by AWS will allow for multiple product models that are compatible with the specification and serve a wide variety of use cases from simple WAN connectivity to SD-WAN and SASE. The specification allows for gateways configured with 48 ports (32x1Gb ports and 16×2.5Gb ports) or 24 ports (24×2.5 Gb ports), both configurations include 4x25Gb SFP28 Uplink Ports. The gateway can support PoE (15.4 to 100 Watts) and optionally Cellular LTE and/or 5G and/or Wi-Fi. The gateway CPU can be a pluggable module with extended computational performance to allow for demanding workloads of SD-WAN and SASE. Software support includes the ONIE loader and SAI providing choice of SONiC or DENT as Network OS. Hardware management leverages OCP hardware baseline management profile. For security, TPM 2.0 module, Secure Boot, and MACSec are supported.
“Collaboration across open ecosystems is key to digital transformation,” says Arpit Joshipura, general manager, networking, edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “Integrating with other thought leaders like OCP has helped the development of our open source NOSes, DENT and SONiC, especially in scaling and securing enterprise edge deployments across use cases. We are especially eager for new developments and specifications harmonising SwitchDev and SAI for more intuitive deployment.”
The OCP has been actively engaged in edge computing since the data centre consolidation trend attenuated and shifted to moving computation to the edge for latency, data recency and data sovereignty, much of this driven by the adoption of AI. Tapping innovations from hyperscale data centre operators, the initial edge computing developments at the OCP started with the community development of the Open Edge Server and cell site gateways, which is now fortified by the addition of the AWS provided Enterprise Edge Gateway speciation. Moving forward, we expect that new OCP community-driven solutions developed in the data centre for modularity of servers, precise time keeping, security, liquid cooling and chiplet based system in package (SiP) to be brought to equipment targeted for edge computing,
“The market for edge computing equipment and services is moving to mainstream volume deployments and open ecosystems will play an important role in creating resilient supply chains. In addition, the modularity contained within the AWS-developed enterprise gateway specification and choice of Network OS will make product variants that are compatible with the specification applicable to many different use cases, which is an imperative as new edge computing use cases continue to emerge. The expanded relationship between AWS and OCP has the potential to be a significant enterprise edge computing market accelerator unleashing innovations that come from an open and collaborative community and benefit many market segments and geographies,” says Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president and general manager, worldwide infrastructure at IDC.
Comment on this article below or via Twitter @IoTGN