Re: 100G - Whitebox

[Fredrik Korsbäck <hugge () nordu net>]

The only viable merchant silicon chip that would be useful for a IXP is from the StrataDNX-family which house the 
jericho/qumran/petra/arad chips from broadcom. No packetbuffer in the exhangepoint will shred performance 
significantly, especially when one of your bursty 100G customers starts sending data into 1/10G customers. 

To the best of my knowledge the only one that offers DNX in whitebox-fashion is Agema and Edgecore. But why whitebox? 
Except on a very few occasions whitebox is just "i like paying hardware and software on different invoices = whitebox" 
the TCO is just the same but. As an exchangepoint i also see that it can hard to reap the benefits of all the 
hipstershit going on in these NOS-startups, you want spanning-tree, port-security, something to loadbalance over links 
and perhaps a overlaying-technology if the IXP becomes to big and distributed, like vxlan. This is to easy almost. 

Whenever i see unbuffered mix-speed IXPs i ask if i can pay 25% of the portcost since that is actually how much oumpfff 
i would get through the port.

// hugge @ 2603

> 20 aug. 2017 kl. 18:40 skrev Bill Woodcock <woody () pch net>:
>
> Why don't we just swap out your 40g switch for a 100g switch?  You've had the 40g one for a while, and we anticipate 
> upgrades every 18-24 months. 
>
>                -Bill
>
>
> > On Aug 20, 2017, at 08:46, Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net> wrote:
> >
> > I first sent to an IX-specific mailing list, but as I have yet to see the message hit the list, I figured I would 
> > post it here as well. 
> >
> > We've had multiple requests for 100G interfaces (instead of Nx10G) and no one seems to care about the 40G interfaces 
> > we have available. 
> >
> > Looking at cost effective options brings us to whitebox switches. Obviously there's a wide range of hardware vendors 
> > and there are a few OSes available as well. Cumulus seems to be the market leader, while IPinFusion seems to be the 
> > most feature-rich. 
> >
> > We're not doing any automation on the switches at this time, so it would still need decent manual configuration. It 
> > wouldn't need a Cisco-centric CLI as we're quite comfortable managing standard Linux-type config files. We're not 
> > going all-in on some overlay either given that we wouldn't be replacing our entire infrastructure, only 
> > supplementing it where we need 100G. I know that LINX has gone IPinfusion. What OS would be appropriate for our 
> > usage? I'm not finding many good comparisons of the OSes out there. I'm assuming any of them would work, but there 
> > may be gotchas that a "cheapest that meets requirements" doesn't quite unveil. 
> >
> > Any particular hardware platforms to go towards or avoid? Broadcom Tomahawk seems to be quite popular with varying 
> > control planes. LINX went Edgecore, which was on my list given my experience with other Accton brands. Fiberstore 
> > has a switch where they actually publish the pricing vs. a bunch of mystery. 
> >
> > Thoughts? 
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ----- 
> > Mike Hammett 
> > Intelligent Computing Solutions 
> > http://www.ics-il.com 
> >
> > Midwest-IX 
> > http://www.midwest-ix.com