OCP Optical Circuit Switching Subproject Update

Author: Brian O'Connor, Google; Richard U, Google Collection: 2025-OCP-Global-Summit-Networking

Summary

Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) is an emerging data center technology that routes light between fiber ports without any electrical conversion, making it transparent to protocol, speed, and packet format. The OCP OCS Working Group was founded in July 2025, began meeting in August, and is structured around four workstreams: open hardware specs, open software specs, data center and AI cluster optimization use cases, and interoperability. Brian O'Connor and Richard U from Google presented the working group's status and Google's specific technical approach to OCS software interfaces.

Google is both a producer and user of OCS devices internally, giving them a unique dual perspective. Their technical approach leverages SONiC as the software base — not because SONiC was built for OCS, but because it provides a large body of reusable infrastructure (management framework, security bootstrapping, telemetry plumbing) that would otherwise need to be built from scratch. The OCS-specific logic is actually a small fraction of the total required software. The interface stack uses gNMI (configuration and telemetry), gNOI (connection control operations), and gNSI (security management) — all via SONiC's Unified Management Framework (UMF). Google's call to action is for vendors to adopt a common open API so that onboarding a new OCS vendor does not require migrating the entire management system.