On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 1:19 AM, Saku Ytti <saku@ytti.fi> wrote:
On 16 June 2016 at 06:21, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke@gmail.com> wrote:
Based on their investors, could have interesting results for much lower cost 100GbE whitebox switches.
Why lower cost? The BOM isn't the expensive part, the code is the expensive part. Only way I see this happening, is if we get open source routing suite for the box, i.e. 0 cost software.
It shouldn't be long before we see open source routing suites (Bird, Quagga, GoBGP, etc) running on Linux (ONL, OS10, OpenSwitch). There is a P4 program that implements the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI), which provides a common interface, device independent, interface to merchant silicon. http://p4.org/p4/an-open-source-p4-switch-with-sai-support/ A quick way to do interesting things with the programmable data plane is to use P4 to augment the basic switching / routing behavior provided by SAI: moving resources from layer 2 tables to layer 3 tables, adding telemetry, adding additional control capabilities, etc.: http://blog.sflow.com/2016/06/programmable-hardware-barefoot-networks.html