Any experience with FS hardware out there?

Fri Jan 5 20:46:21 UTC 2018


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
>