RE: Any experience with Broadcom ICOS out there?

["Chuck Church" <chuckchurch () gmail com>]

I smell some BS here, at least in their 'Verified Purchase' reviews:

"It is installed as a network hub in my basement and it is working fine. Great quality product. I've had a lot of 
business with FS for years. This is a very reliable company and they stand behind their company's products with a first 
class warranty! I highly recommend."

"It just takes several days to receive my 100G switch with Broadcom ICOS which is packaged safely and intactly. I 
followed the instruction and seems simple for a non-tech user. Three steps would be done: plug it in, cable it up, turn 
it on. Just the way a good product should be. I would like to recommend both the product and the seller."


Non tech user, network hub in my basement.  $10K L3 switch.  Jesus.  The Tactical Flashlight seems more believable 
right now.

Chuck.

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces () nanog org] On Behalf Of Eric Kuhnke
Sent: Friday, January 05, 2018 4:55 PM
To: Bryan Holloway <bryan () shout net>; nanog () nanog org list <nanog () nanog org>
Subject: Re: Any experience with Broadcom ICOS out there?

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