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Re: Barefoot "Tofino": 6.4 Tbps whitebox switch silicon?


From: Colton Conor <colton.conor () gmail com>
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2016 07:40:13 -0500

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



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