On Sat, 9 Mar 2019 at 16:09, Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> wrote:
Right now, the cost of the whitebox plus a paid network operating system seems to equal the same cost as a discounted Juniper, Cisco, or Arista. I am not seeing the savings on paper.
I'm not going to defend the prices of Cisco/Juniper/et al. as they are often ridiculous however, there are many services you can get from these larger vendors that you can't from the smaller ones; it's not only some hardware, software, a bit of support and the occasional bug fix. Big vendors like Cisco and Juniper (and others, these are just examples) have a plethora of additional services smaller white box vendors don't have. My point here is, you seem to be suggesting the white box vendors offer the exact same service for less money but, in my experience this isn't apples for apples.
If we could just buy the whitebox hardware, and have a free operating system on there, then financially whitebox switches would be half the cost of a similar Cisco switch after discount.
If you think about Capex only then possibly yes it could be cheaper.
Am I missing something?
Yes. Can you imagine what a support nightmare it would be when there is a compatibility issue between software and hardware and those two components are from two different vendors and you're having major packet loss in your network? How will you manage NMS integration when the hardware vendor implements counters for that feature you use but the software vendor doesn’t, or vice versa? I’m not saying this can’t be done. Cumulus have many happy customers using white box switches so it definitely can be done. I’m saying, it’s not just about the Capex. Cheers, James.