 such as described in recent successful field trials (Making the Switch 2017). Fabric disaggregation: Until recently, network fabric technology was a "blackbox." Blackbox the industry term for a vertically integrated packet switching platform of hardware and software, with limited visibility to the inner workings often considered proprietary by OEM suppliers. Input/ output behavior of the blackbox was defined by open standards (such as IETF and IEEE standards). This began to change with programs such as the Open Compute Project initiated by Facebook* and Google's Jupiter project (Singh et al. 2015) that have led to disaggregation of blackboxes into "whiteboxes" or "grayboxes" along three major dimensions-software from hardware, Clos from chassis, and third-party optics from branded optics. While the disaggregation of software from hardware is covered later, the disaggregation of Clos from chassis is implemented by replacing the chassis switching backplane by optically cabling mul- tiple identical small whiteboxes in a Clos topology. A chassis with a fixed backplane only allows for matching supplier line cards whereas, the elimination of a backplane has the benefit of avoiding vendor lock-in allowing pay as you grow scale out and homogeneous stock keeping unit's (SKU) at high volumes for economies of scale. The third fabric disaggregation is facilitated by going to off-the-shelf optical components in place of branded versions from OEM suppliers. As the price per bit of merchant silicon has dropped www.opencompute.org. Building the Network of the Future dramatically, the price of optics, as a relative contribution to total cost, has become a more dominant factor. Optical plugs are generally developed by third parties. Historically, OEMs would only allow branded optics from third parties at added cost. Now with whiteboxes and grayboxes, optics can be procured separately from the box supplier and appropriate competitive bidding and new optics options are substantially driving down the cost. High volume commoditizatio