Re: 100G - Whitebox

[Bill Woodcock <woody () pch net>]

Why don't we just swap out your 40g switch for a 100g switch?  You've had the 40g one for a while, and we anticipate 
upgrades every 18-24 months. 
    
                -Bill


> On Aug 20, 2017, at 08:46, Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net> wrote:
>
> I first sent to an IX-specific mailing list, but as I have yet to see the message hit the list, I figured I would 
> post it here as well. 
>
> We've had multiple requests for 100G interfaces (instead of Nx10G) and no one seems to care about the 40G interfaces 
> we have available. 
>
> Looking at cost effective options brings us to whitebox switches. Obviously there's a wide range of hardware vendors 
> and there are a few OSes available as well. Cumulus seems to be the market leader, while IPinFusion seems to be the 
> most feature-rich. 
>
> We're not doing any automation on the switches at this time, so it would still need decent manual configuration. It 
> wouldn't need a Cisco-centric CLI as we're quite comfortable managing standard Linux-type config files. We're not 
> going all-in on some overlay either given that we wouldn't be replacing our entire infrastructure, only supplementing 
> it where we need 100G. I know that LINX has gone IPinfusion. What OS would be appropriate for our usage? I'm not 
> finding many good comparisons of the OSes out there. I'm assuming any of them would work, but there may be gotchas 
> that a "cheapest that meets requirements" doesn't quite unveil. 
>
> Any particular hardware platforms to go towards or avoid? Broadcom Tomahawk seems to be quite popular with varying 
> control planes. LINX went Edgecore, which was on my list given my experience with other Accton brands. Fiberstore has 
> a switch where they actually publish the pricing vs. a bunch of mystery. 
>
> Thoughts? 
>
>
>
>
> ----- 
> Mike Hammett 
> Intelligent Computing Solutions 
> http://www.ics-il.com 
>
> Midwest-IX 
> http://www.midwest-ix.com