Top of rack requires space, which must be paid for monthly in a colo'ed environment, or reduces usable space (ie. revenue generating space) for hosting/cloud pr

Top of rack requires space, which must be paid for monthly in a colo'ed environment, or reduces usable space (ie. revenue generating space) for hosting/cloud providers. Done in actual host CPU consumes resources. Direct programming on a chipset is a lot more complicated than running an off the shelf router. Yes this is a niche product - but your proposed alternatives are silly in most cases where just slapping a zero U device into an unused PCIe port is far less complicated, less expensive, and easier to maintain. This thing costs less than $200, a one time cost. Just reading the Broadcom documentation alone will cost your organization more than that...