4 ms·

It would be interesting to see a refreshed view of what products white-box is able to replace. I recall that Juniper and Cisco were hard to replace for some pr

by tyingq 5y ago

It would be interesting to see a refreshed view of what products white-box is able to replace. I recall that Juniper and Cisco were hard to replace for some products because the performance edge was in proprietary ASICs that aren't available to white box builders. I suspect that CPU improvements and things like user-space networking (DPDK and friends) might have closed the gap some, but I haven't seen any recent analysis.

kazen44 5y ago
i doubt you are able to get the same features out of whitebox hardware. Juniper's core routers have neat features in terms of redundancy. failing over a FPC (card with ASIC) to another routing engine(control plane) without downtime or packet flow impact is a big one. Performance might be there on the lower end (<40g), but there are a lot of features which require asics. Another example is QoS/CoS without impacting performance or queues. These are the kind of things you cannot handle at the CPU without impacting traffic performance, which bites you when you are doing major traffic flows.
bifrost 5y ago
The main leap for whitebox is AES-NI for SSL/TLS offload. Nobody is really using DPDK/NETMAP in OSS products from what I can tell. Netgate is doing TNSR, but its not open source: https://www.netgate.com/tnsr-applications/edge-routing https://www.netgate.com/tnsr-applications/edge-routing
- sekh60 5y ago
  Check out vyos.net
  - bifrost 5y ago
    True, although every time I've tried it out its been fairly garbagey so I never considered it seriously. Its been at least 2 years though, I'll try it again.
mmmBacon 5y ago
Actually I think P4 programmable switch ASICs such as Barefoot are going to become more prevalent over time and hence features will be available in software.
- kazen44 5y ago
  hasn't P4 been kind of dead in the water for the last couple of years.
  - mmmBacon 5y ago
    P4 programmability is available in Cisco Silicon One so wouldn’t call P4 dead in the water. Cisco Silicon One is meant to go head to head against Broadcom. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/silicon-one/datasheet-c78-744312.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/silicon-o... In other merchant silicon, while not P4, Broadcom has offered their own proprietary programmability in Trident 3/4. I think adoption has been slower more due to lack of relevant domain expertise in software as well as relative inability of pretty much anyone to properly model the impact of routing features on a production network than anything else. P4 is being widely adopted at the NIC level.

by tyingq 5y ago

kazen44 5y ago

i doubt you are able to get the same features out of whitebox hardware. Juniper's core routers have neat features in terms of redundancy. failing over a FPC (card with ASIC) to another routing engine(control plane) without downtime or packet flow impact is a big one. Performance might be there on the lower end (<40g), but there are a lot of features which require asics. Another example is QoS/CoS without impacting performance or queues. These are the kind of things you cannot handle at the CPU without impacting traffic performance, which bites you when you are doing major traffic flows.

bifrost 5y ago

The main leap for whitebox is AES-NI for SSL/TLS offload. Nobody is really using DPDK/NETMAP in OSS products from what I can tell. Netgate is doing TNSR, but its not open source: https://www.netgate.com/tnsr-applications/edge-routing https://www.netgate.com/tnsr-applications/edge-routing

sekh60 5y ago
Check out vyos.net
- bifrost 5y ago
  True, although every time I've tried it out its been fairly garbagey so I never considered it seriously. Its been at least 2 years though, I'll try it again.

mmmBacon 5y ago

Actually I think P4 programmable switch ASICs such as Barefoot are going to become more prevalent over time and hence features will be available in software.

kazen44 5y ago
hasn't P4 been kind of dead in the water for the last couple of years.
- mmmBacon 5y ago
  P4 programmability is available in Cisco Silicon One so wouldn’t call P4 dead in the water. Cisco Silicon One is meant to go head to head against Broadcom. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/silicon-one/datasheet-c78-744312.html https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/silicon-o... In other merchant silicon, while not P4, Broadcom has offered their own proprietary programmability in Trident 3/4. I think adoption has been slower more due to lack of relevant domain expertise in software as well as relative inability of pretty much anyone to properly model the impact of routing features on a production network than anything else. P4 is being widely adopted at the NIC level.