whitebox

got it

As a reference, here's a list of h/w partners for @pica8 http://www.pica8.com...

Are these ODMs enthusiastic about #whiteboxes? I guess they think it can grow their market?

Yes of course they do -- without naming names, ODMs commonly tell us they see @Cisco's market as potential revenue for them, that is over $20B to take!

very interesting

It is funny, customers like the idea of lower costs and more freedom. A vertically integrated company like @Cisco does not like this trending

@afewell good to see you here!

Hey since Art is here from Dell, we can talk to Bright Boxes, another disruption that leverage the SW and HW disaggregation idea

agreed - welcome and good to see you here @afewell :-)

For Q2, the top use case is a classic top of rack switch, or Leaf switch -- the web giants proved this model out

We are seeing both large and small companies adopt the idea -- all with a dream to be more like Amazon from a services perspective

we provide a portal OS, with a CLI just like @Cisco or @Juniper Networks - it is that simple. We also leverage open standards like ONIE from the Open Compute Project to allow easy installation

*portable OS (spell check) ;-)

The real driver is more operational freedom, to have one software OS and change out the hardware as needed

You mentioned #opencompute. How big a deal do you think it is?

Long term it is a big deal, for now we are building hte community and aligning all the pieces for an easy to use supply chain. We have critical mass as companies like @Dell, @Broadcome and @HP are part of it

OCP is a pretty big deal, IMHO, if recent announcements are anything to go by ... plus FB has really been shaking things up with it's disaggregation model ...

Nice. What other standards groups do you see as most important in driving #SDN and #whiteboxes?

@VishalSharma I agree FB is causing waves, and reportedly @cisco does not like it

perhaps initiatives like OpenStack, and a # of open-source initiatives, which make it easier to manage disparate hardware ...

I agree iwith Vishal -- OCP is the main one here

The next OCP is March 10 and 11 just FYI in San Jose CA

no in fact, i think the exact verbiage from the CEO was "crush" FB :)

and @pica8 - yes, just registered for it this morning :-)

Sounds like FB is sucking a lot of the air out of the room.

Or maybe @facebook is sucking air out of the #datacenter

@VishalSharma - agree with your take on open source initiatives - interoperability is becoming more important than ever

I think OCP is fundamentally important, enterprise vendors are largely selling a different set of solutions to enterprises than what they sell to cloud, we need more transparency, checks/balances and operator engagement to drive market economics

we saw that it took a company the size of google going to ODM's to get Ciscos attention to change their ways ... how is the average enterprise going to ensure they get a fair shake. Sure OCP is not enterprise but it attracts their attention and involvement

For Q2, the top use case is a classic TOR switch, or Leaf switch - we've seen this in data centers and cloud SPs

TOR meaning Top of Rack for our audience out there...

any other use cases?

large and small companies moving to mimic what we see on the server side, just like Amazon and others have proved

there ARE other use cases, like campus or management networks, but the biggest one by far is in the data center

so you are saying I may not need one in my garage yet..

Big Data drives everything.

More than brand on the box, the silicon underneath - sinsle system on chip designs for switches have set the bar for switching efficiency across all use cases

Merchant silicon specifically, now you see nearly all vendors offering similar hardware around merchant silicon and this is becoming the dominant paradigm in switching

and I also think could relate to HP's bad quarter, they invested in SDN but have been way behind on merchant silicon

Art good points! We totally agree! This is a key aspect of an open supply chain

A key ONOS use case revolves around re-architecting the Service Provider Central Office like a datacenter using commodity hardware and spine/leaf topology. Whiteboxes have an important role to play in this use case & in fact in all use cases

it is a big deal

I think it is a big deal because if hardware shifts to new customer facing companies like Accton or Quanta, guess who does not get the revenue? If Dell and HP take share with bright boxes, guess who does not take share

I think the market is in the state it is today because certain underpinnings pushed things that way, and a lot of those factors have already changed

When a big company like @Cisco seems threatened it tells me we are on the right path

Hmm. @Cisco is quiet here

the biggest one is that the leading public clouds set the bar on efficiency using open technologies, enterprises are trying to get to that level of efficiency and nobody can make some smoke/mirrors claim that you need some proprietary feature

well said Art, and Scott, i sure dont feel crushed yet!

next biggest is merchant silicon, how much more would we pay for one wintel x86 server vs another? not much, soon this paradigm will dominate networking

I think as public clouds share more, more will seek architectures that emulate, not like UCS which in many ways moves the opposite direction of cloud architecture - vertical integration - centralized forwarding etc..