Barefoot "Tofino": 6.4 Tbps whitebox switch silicon?

Thu Jun 16 12:40:13 UTC 2016

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 at ytti.fi> wrote:

> On 16 June 2016 at 06:21, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke at 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
>