Saku, I agree completely. Isn't this what Arista did? They coded from like 2004 to 2008 before launching EOS using commercial chipsets. You seem to really understand routing software, so I would love to hear your take on Arista EOS. On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 3:19 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.
If you're thinking of writing your own routing suite, even if your requirements are trivial, it's still probably take 2-3 years and +2MUSD in salaries, and then maintenance +300kUSD/year in salaries. Need quite significant annual unit number scale to make it cheap.
I'm quite fascinated by the idea of doing something really novel in routing suite space, but I don't see how it could possibly work commercially. How many customers would there be for licensing COTS routing-suite when costs are millions annually to develop it for general use-case.
-- ++ytti