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You may not. But large enterprises that pay billions a year for networking gear, who can save a billion by buying whitebox, and still get that Cisco feel that t
by Trisell 10y ago
You may not. But large enterprises that pay billions a year for networking gear, who can save a billion by buying whitebox, and still get that Cisco feel that they have spent years training and acquiring expertise will and already are. It may not be IOS. But Cisco will come out with something that feels and operates like IOS that runs on x86. Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86.
Between whitebox and SDN. These companies won't be selling hardware for the 1-200% markup the have enjoyed all these years.
- signa11 10y ago> Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86. huh :) i was/am under the impression that with junos, juniper started with freebsd as the core, and then added lot's of stuff to it, specifically in control-plane and a bunch of kernel extensions as well. if that is true, they were already x86 compatible... with cisco things are very different. i don't think ios ever ran on a bare-metal x86. this is not for the lack of trying though (if you know folks who have worked on ios, check with them, writing about it here, doesn't seem right)
- mcbain 10y agoJunos has run on x86 for years - Juniper had i686 control planes in some devices. As well as PPC and a few different kinds of MIPS (Octeon, XLR) - although those are usually data plane. Newer products use virtualization, i.e. running the FreeBSD-based Junos control plane in a VM.
- walrus01 10y agoThe very first juniper ever was basically a freebsd box glued to a bunch of custom ASIC and line cards. The m40. It has always been x86 and now x86-64.
- kubuqi 10y agoNot much difference I'm afraid. IOS-XE is essentially the product of porting the classic IOS and runs it as a controlling process that sits top of linux, and with dedicated forwarding path. If you look up for IOU, which stands for IOs over Unix, it has been around for quit a long time.
- sengork 10y agoI've seen some older Cisco storage switches which utilised Pentium 4 CPUs and SAN-OS instead of the usual custom built Motorola processors for the non-ASIC components of the device.