Re: Any experience with Broadcom ICOS out there?

[Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke () gmail com>]

You may have better results with the same question on OCP (open compute
platform) related forums and mailing lists. The Quanta version of that
switch sold by FS is pretty much the same thing:

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/801037-qct-reveals-their-quantamesh-network-switches/

Quanta has been very active in the OCP community for whitebox switches. I
have heard that they are the switch manufacturer for a great deal of
Facebook's hyperscale stuff.



On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 1:46 PM, Bryan Holloway <bryan () shout net> wrote:

> Thank you everyone for the responses so far; I should probably re-phrase
> the question at this point ...
>
> Has anyone had production experience with Broadcom ICOS and the features
> it claims to support? Positive or negative?
>
>
> On 1/5/18 2:46 PM, joel jaeggli wrote:
>
> > On 1/5/18 10:50 AM, Bryan Holloway wrote:
> >
> > > Fiberstore is rolling out some CRAZY cheap 100Gbps switches, and I'm
> > > curious if anyone in the community has any thoughts or real-life world
> > > experience with them.
> > >
> > > E.g.: https://www.fs.com/products/69340.html
> > >
> > > For the price point, it's almost in the "too good to be true" category.
> > The COGS on a single ASIC tomahawk switch was is in $5000-7000 range. so
> > it's consistent with a low value add reseller of merchant silicon. that
> > silicon is getting older (tomahawk 3 was announced in anticipation of 2018)
> > so we can presume they are getting cheaper. I generally have a favorable
> > experience of FS but then I buy optics and cables, not switches so your
> > mileage may vary.
> >
> > Naturally it claims to support an impressive range of features including
> > > BGP, IS-IS, OSPF, MPLS, VRFs, blah blah blah.
> > The software stack is Broadcom ICOS. if you're not familiar with that I
> > start looking at that. if it meets you needs that's cool. if not you might
> > be looking at cumulus or onos. That said Broadcom does enough to get their
> > customers (whitebox odms) out the door, not necessarily the customers of
> > those odms so your recourse to a developer is kind of limited which you get
> > a from a vendor more involved in the software stack. A lot of those choices
> > here depend on how responsible you want to be for what's running inside the
> > box.
> >
> > > There was an earlier discussion about packet buffer issues, but,
> > > assuming for a second that it's not an issue,
> > It can be avoided, but for people used to running all 10Gb/s cut-through
> > trident 2s kind of hot, some of consequences are kind of impressive. 4 much
> > smaller buffers and the virtual assurance that you'll be doing rate
> > conversion eats into the forwarding budget.
> >
> > > can anyone say they've used these and/or the L2/L3 features that they
> > > purportedly support?
> > >
> > > Thanks!
> > >             - bryan