Been a long time since I’ve messed with it but Vyatta may be worth looking at. https://vyos.io/ On Sat, Mar 9, 2019 at 09:09 Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> wrote:

What free, opensouce, network operating systems currently exist that run on whitebox broadcom or other merchant silicon switches?

I know Cumulus is very popular, but I don't believe they have a free version that runs on whitebox switches right? Only on a virtual machine from what I can tell.

I think if one of these vendors would release a free and truly opensource network operating system, with the option for paid support if needed, then whitebox switching would really take off. This would be similar to the Redhat model, but for the networking world.

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.

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.

Am I missing something?

-- :Luke Marrott

I could be making this up, but my understanding is that the Broadcom SDK is not free, and without the SDK, hardware interaction is limited. At one time ONL was a free ONIE NOS but sans SDK. https://github.com/opencomputeproject/OpenNetworkLinux <https://github.com/opencomputeproject/OpenNetworkLinux> ? Sent from my iPhone On Mar 9, 2019, at 11:08 AM, Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com <mailto:colton.conor@gmail.com>> wrote:

What free, opensouce, network operating systems currently exist that run on whitebox broadcom or other merchant silicon switches?

I know Cumulus is very popular, but I don't believe they have a free version that runs on whitebox switches right? Only on a virtual machine from what I can tell.

I think if one of these vendors would release a free and truly opensource network operating system, with the option for paid support if needed, then whitebox switching would really take off. This would be similar to the Redhat model, but for the networking world.

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.

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.

Am I missing something?

SONiC https://azure.github.io/SONiC/ On Sat, Mar 9, 2019, 10:09 AM Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> wrote:

What free, opensouce, network operating systems currently exist that run on whitebox broadcom or other merchant silicon switches?

I know Cumulus is very popular, but I don't believe they have a free version that runs on whitebox switches right? Only on a virtual machine from what I can tell.

I think if one of these vendors would release a free and truly opensource network operating system, with the option for paid support if needed, then whitebox switching would really take off. This would be similar to the Redhat model, but for the networking world.

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.

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.

Am I missing something?

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.