 define the use of any specific hard- ware or software. The other implementation options are perfectly valid for consideration. Also, consider the overall development timeline associated with the product, as shown in Fig. 4-1. In the end, the overhead associated with custom hardware development is dwarfed by software development and deployment timelines. Moving to a COTS based system saves time but is not a silver bullet. 142 Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Systems Architecture and Design Custom, Hardware System/Field Test Optimized 3-6 months 12-18 months 3-6 months Reference- Hardware System/Field Test Design Based <3 months 12-18 months 3-6 months System/Field Test Platform 12-18 months 3-6 months 15-24 18-27 18-30 Months Months Months FIGURE 4-1 Development timelines for a typical product based on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), reference design and customized systems (indicative only). The tradeoffs here are important are in the end driven by commercials where balance needs to be struck between: Target volume of deployment Unit cost overhead associated with COTS platform Development overheads associated with a more custom platform Development timeline and product lifecycle: how long until the next revision of the product comes out and a more optimized COTS platform has overtaken the optimized but now outdated custom unit. Data center architecture In a disaggregated environment, resources are de-coupled, and each resource can be imple- mented (and scaled) independently from each other. In traditional data center implementa- tions, elements of disaggregation include compute, storage and networking that can be scaled independently to be used for on-demand allocation by any (cloud) application. In a 5G centric data center, the application is better known (much less generic). This allows for optimization: choice between general purpose (GPP) hardware or application opti- mized (accelerated) implementations to be chosen depending on requirements with regards to cost, performance, power and flexibility/time to m