[190135] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Barefoot "Tofino": 6.4 Tbps whitebox switch silicon?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Colton Conor)
Thu Jun 16 08:40:16 2016
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <CAAeewD9S+U4BDA52ChBnegeDrg1SCO0QS-2_BWwZxrB-z1RDLw@mail.gmail.com>
From: Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2016 07:40:13 -0500
To: Saku Ytti <saku@ytti.fi>
Cc: nanog list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
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
>
