[190123] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Barefoot "Tofino": 6.4 Tbps whitebox switch silicon?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Saku Ytti)
Thu Jun 16 04:19:17 2016
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <CAB69EHgXiGhTrGumckHEcsNOHA6++9XabdYZMgMb5gMjFLQrSg@mail.gmail.com>
From: Saku Ytti <saku@ytti.fi>
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2016 11:19:13 +0300
To: Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke@gmail.com>
Cc: nanog list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
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
