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Amazon Plans To Challenge Cisco in Networking Market With Much Cheaper Switches, Report Says (theinformation.com)
Amazon Web Services already dominates the market for cloud services. Now, reports The Information, it is eyeing a part of the cloud business it doesn't already control: the $14 billion global market for data center switches [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the report: AWS is considering selling its own networking switches for business customers -- hardware devices that move traffic around networks, according to a person with direct knowledge of the cloud unit's plans and another person who has been briefed on the project. The plan could plunge Amazon more deeply into the lucrative enterprise computing market, posing a direct challenge to incumbents in the business like Cisco, along with Arista Networks and Juniper Networks.
As it does in many other categories, Amazon plans to use price to undercut rivals. The company could price its white-box switches between 70% and 80% less than comparable switches from Cisco, one of the people with knowledge of the program estimated.
As it does in many other categories, Amazon plans to use price to undercut rivals. The company could price its white-box switches between 70% and 80% less than comparable switches from Cisco, one of the people with knowledge of the program estimated.
I remember when they ascended to become the hottest tech company on the planet. Never were able to successfully pivot from their core business.
They will need to compete on more than just price.
This is why Cisco purchased (2003), absorbed, destroyed, and released (2013) Linksys - their higher end devices were able to replace a growing percentage of the switches and routers being marketed towards smaller businesses. M&A is a very successful way to kill a competitor in the US, GOV rarely cares and is for sale, and the investors rarely care after they cash out. But Cisco can't afford Amazon. High end switch market has been a mess, software configured networking is eating it alive, and its amazing what you can do with a simple Docker network. Be nice to see someone with a budget release some cheaper hardware where we still need actual hardware.
Complete with "cloud" management so that Amazon retains control, not only of all of my data, but my network configurations and routing. Is there a way to use 100 point font on Slashdot to write: FUCK THAT ?
Cisco always has to prices: The list-price and the retail price to customers who are "in the know". The latter is usually 60-70% below list-price.
Which one is Amazon going to undercut ? If it is the first... Meh... Not so interesting.
If it is the second... Then things get interresting. They will even be undercutting HPE/Aruba then.
We are able to get switches and routers for cheap for a while. Many have the same features that Cisco offers.
The reason most companies stick with Cisco, is because they are able to find Certified Staff to work on their products.
If a company tried to upgrade to Amazon Fire Sale Switches, then you need to find staff willing to maintain them and do it properly with best practices in mind, may be difficult. You can probably get Cisco Certified staff to work on them, however if there are any differences there may be an issue.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Seems like every time Cisco needs something new they call in Mario, Prem, Luca & Soni (MPLS).
Need switching acquire Crescendo (cat5k -> Cat6k), started by them.
Needed a storage switch? Spin out and spin back in. MDS
Need servers and ToRs? Spin out and back in
Pseudo-SDN (ACI) with hardware lockin? A Spin out and spin back in.
Not sure that Chuck will go back to them on bended knee and beg for them to save the day again.
Prime members have their packets delivered in 2 nanoseconds or less.
From Amazon's perspective this makes sense, provide priority bandwidth for Alexa and Amazon Prime as well as providing a way of monitoring customers' internet habits. Hopefully, they will be providing a high level of security so the information they're accessing/collecting doesn't become available to third parties.
When there are *lots* of low-cost switches that I don't have to worry about Amazon's potential for taking over my home, why would I want to buy from them?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I.e to get into market, start with solid cheap stuff (where the requirements are low). Then try to fight the big players.
My estimated outcome: either they do not survive one year or they become as expensive as Cisco if they win.
100 years from now Amazon will be the new Umbrella or Cyberdyne System Corporation.
Is it still going to be cheaper than Cisco when you pay to not get ads delivered to everything connected to your network switch?
Is this going to be like their phones and their tablets and their e-readers where you have to pay more not to get ads?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Cheap 10+Gb ethernet cards and switches.
Why are they still around $100 a port?
Software defined networking is great when dealing with networks at a high enough level. People have been making routers from commodity hardware for a very long time. Obviously people have produced special purpose hardware for routing as this means they can optimize the hardware for the task and can do so cheaper than someone grabbing a PC, filling it with interface cards, and loading some software onto it.
Switching is different than routing, it's done on a different level. The hardware needed is more complex, and therefore more expensive, than what is found in commodity computers. Go and try to find a software defined switch. I tried, and they don't exist. The closest you will find is a switch defined as a virtual machine. Load up something like VMWare ESXi and you'll find a way to create a software switch, but it can only switch packets among the virtual machines on that system.
People have made limited software switches with server style Ethernet cards (which grant greater access to the packet content than a desktop Ethernet controller) and the right kind of software but they are expensive and slow. They are really only useful for things like testing, training, or demonstrations.
This is a big deal because this means Amazon is getting in the hardware business in a way that is quite rare. Amazon is a large enough company that they may actually be able to follow through.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Dell, HP, others have their own competition to Cisco. I doubt Amazon can produce (or acquire) a technology that could seriously compete. Will they replace their Cisco gear in their data centers with their own? And when they have an entire zone outage from it?
And for that, you're going to need some actual physical hardware.
So what are Amazon's plans to address support of both software and hardware? How will they fix security issues and other bugs? Will they provide the needed assurance this won't be abandoned in another couple years for the next new shiny thing? Or do they just plan to dump their stuff on the market and hope for the best and tell the end customer they need to support it?
Well, I was assuming the parent was joking, that it could be software all the way down, which isn't obviously possible.
In terms of software defined switches, generally speaking they consider any switch that can be ONIE to be 'SDN-friendly', and some others.Sure, there are switching chips doing the actual moving of the data (there pretty much has to be), but their primitive capabilities are exposed to software for more in depth wrangling.
In practice though the complexity of SDN switching is well beyond the point of diminishing returns for almost everywhere to bother with.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"Hardware? I though everything was headed towards SDN (software defined networking)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_networking"
(Your article says SDN started becoming a topic in 2011.)
1)You would think AWS would know a bit about SDN, since they basically invented it, and made it available as part of a service to customers in 2009, except they called it VPC:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Virtual_Private_Cloud
2)You probably still need networking-specific hardware; you want a higher ratio of network ports to CPUs in a typical switch than a typical PC or server. Amazon already makes custom network hardware for servers and switches using 25GbE, apparently including 100GbE using QSFP (4Ã--25GbE) (where AFAIK Cisco only does up to 4x10GbE between switches and their server hardware and 100GbE is only available between reall really expensive core switches - N7K - and really really expensive routers - ASR9K or NCS6K).
See e.g.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/30/aws_hardware/
Amazon plans to do this the same way Cisco, Arista and everyone else does this now: by selling switches built with merchant (Broadcom) silicon. If you're a business entity, you already get a 40% discount, minimum, on Cisco's list price. So, the decision is really whether saving 30-40% is worth running potentially buggier hardware, potentially worse support and facing a potentially high learning curve. It may be: when these Broadcom switches first game out, vendors had to compete with Cisco's custom-silicon Nexus 5k and 7k platforms, which were (and are) pretty good boxes and had massive market penetration. Some vendors, like Arista, were able to immediately compete with Cisco selling a product that had the features data center customers cared about (low latency, deep buffers) and excluded those they didn't (MPLS, large routing tables). It certainly helped that anyone who was familiar with IOS and it's syntax could provision one of their boxes without having to look at much documentation. Amazon could certainly do this as well, but the market is already pretty crowded and more mature in terms of features and stability, so I'm not sure how they really plan on sticking out.
It won't take a whole lot to undercut Cisco since they have always had ridiculous pricing.
Even companies with damn near infinite amounts of cash finally started looking at other vendors because of ludicrous price levels.
However !
That said, I have decommissioned Cisco routers and switches that have been running ( without a reboot ) for twenty plus YEARS without a hiccup.
I doubt you're going to find that sort of reliability in anything offered at rock bottom prices.
So, while expensive as hell, I can't complain about the operational track record.
Hmm, I'm using 10Gbps software switch as real 10Gbps switch is still too expensive...
Just group your interfaces into a bridge -- after all the core function of a switch is a bridge. No software required; it's build into the kernel already.
# man bridge
Like kbonin and others have commented, the networking equipment market is a freaking overpriced mess. That's why Cisco acquired Linksys years ago and then subsequently crippled Linksys switches -- they were eating away at Cisco's high margins.
But now, if Amazon beings to play the role of Linksys, then there is not much Cisco can do about it. Cisco certainly is not in a position to acquire Amazon like it did with Linksys 15 years ago. So Cisco will be forced to lower its prices. Other vendors will be forced to lower their prices too.
However, this is going to depend on how much Cisco retains their brand prestige over the next few years. Because there are some established brands that are kind of shitty, but managers still purchase them anyway so that they don't get fired. Kind of like how nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, and so on. Cisco is also in that group to a cetain extent.
Equipment from Buffalo and Ubiquiti Networks are nice and reasonably priced. We have a Buffalo PoE managed switch here in the office. Cisco's equivalent switch would have costed us like 3 - 4x more.
So I'm glad to see Amazon getting into this market.
100GbE switching is available for dirt cheap on the N9K platform.
Switching is in fact FAR simpler then routing. Layer 3 switches are a hybrid router with switching logic. Pure switching simply looks at feild X in a packet and switches it to the correct egress port with a single table lookup. That is trivial. Routing has to look at the entire table and match based on a list of rules. Layer 3 switches let you bring the joys of policy routing to switching. There is real need for 100G switches in a affordable price point for DC's. Along with that they want layer3 switching/routing.
Well, I was assuming the parent was joking, that it could be software all the way down, which isn't obviously possible.
Yes, I realized that was quite probable after I submitted my post.
In practice though the complexity of SDN switching is well beyond the point of diminishing returns for almost everywhere to bother with.
Agreed, I imagine there is a market for software defined switching but it is quite small because the costs outweigh the benefits for most cases. I can also imagine much of that market exists in places where much of the network is virtual, like the VM clusters I mentioned in my previous post. It may be possible that software defined switches could gain more of the market. I'm thinking that not only would cost be a consideration but also security. I don't know much about how software defined switching would work but I'm quite certain the more general purpose the hardware the less secure it will be.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I'm sure AWS has been designing and making their own hardware for their cloud service for years. Why not roll it out to the masses?
Which support 10G or better, have open source operating systems (BSD, Linux, etc) and open source friendly hardware on board, and have products in the 500-2500 dollar range?
I've been looking for solid VLAN capable managed 10G+ switches/routers/backplanes for a while now and haven't seen much.that competes with cisco/juniper/etc at the low-mid range, which is where my budget is at.
If Amazon uses their own switch to power their own super huge datacenter... that's a solid argument that those switches actually works!
My Nexus 9372's are SDN...
At layer 2, the promise of value is more granular control over packet forwarding than designating vlans.
The switch chips under the covers have a great deal of impossibly complicated capabilities that traditional switch config software abstracts away to basically vlan and not much else. Traditionally there is also sometimes helpful filtering (e.g. 'do not forward ethernet frame if it's dhcp response'), though that is a bit rare and generally hard to configure. There exists a contingent of folks who want to go deeper and imagine higher performance topology (e.g. a fat tree, torus, dragonfly, basically the sorts of topologies you see in infiniband and omnipath) that spanning tree would spit all over, and MST or similar would be too coarse. TRILL was the 'non-SDN' answer proposed to provide other topologies on ethernet, but that didn't pan out.
Problem is that in practice, it's trying to reinvent the infiniband sort of strategy (openflow controller is like an infiniband subnet manager) and this is very difficult to pull off, and generally superfluous for most people and the rest could... just get infiniband where the solution is pretty mature....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Software defined networking is only useful for service providers to secure access. When you have multiple customers hosted on the same VMWare servers you need to make a network that is scale-able and secure. You do this by creating a separate subnet and a private vlan. If they have multiple machines across several vmware hosts then you create a community pvlan and away you go. Everyone can share the same primary private vlan which allows for easy subnetting but the switch won't allow them to cross secondary vlans. This is all defined in-software, at the switch level it is just a single tagged vlan primary vlan, and then tagged secondary vlans for each customer.
SDN is just like using the term cloud, it's just another term for something people have been doing for over a decade. If you're a business with only a few VLANs and not much infrastructure churn then you have no need for SDN. If you have a lot of churn then it can make sense as it is easy to scale out and remain PCI, hippa, or ferpa compliant.
In my environment the first customer took me a week to provision properly with SDN, the second customer took less than 5 minutes. I'm limited only by my ability to spin up a new vm from my gold image and then assigning it to the new network. Everything else takes about 1 minutes start to finish.
Yes this can be done with a regular computer but it will not perform at near the same level as a real managed switch that is using ASICs to do all the work which are purpose built to do exactly that. They will outperform a CPU doing the work every-time. You can throw a ton of CPU at a PFSense box and achieve good performance but then you might as well bought a real firewall which will be easier to manage and perform even better.
I say that as someone that threw together two old servers to make a PFSense HA cluster until we could afford actual firewalls which more than doubled our performance overnight. It's easy to look at a NIC and think that its 10gig so put two together and you'll get 10gig switching throughput. You'll be lucky to get 5 out of it.
so, 19y 11m of unpatched bugs and back doors.
Good to know.
Has she he's really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? That's far more important than how many gay.
The NSA was already caught hacking Cisco's routers before foreign customers received them. I wonder how secure Amazon's are? Do they subcontract the manufacture to China? Does the Chinese government get a back door out of the deal?
Yes, software switches do exist (aka "bridge"), but, as you mention, they're slow as crap because software (general purpose CPU) has to move frames from interface to interface.
Amazon isn't "getting into the hardware biz". They're just going to (sub)contract that shit to any number of "white box" switch makers already gluing common Broadcom (etc.) switch SoCs to boards. The OS on those boxes will most likely just be a customized / rebadged existing network OS.
Openvswitch.
Says the guy that has probably never needed to call Cisco TAC lvl2 about a zero day bug found in a $10 mil+ DC.
There's lots of competitors out there and the telco I work for has all of them in small amounts in both DC's but none of them comes close to Cisco TAC until that changes we won't move over anything major over to the wannabe's except edge devices (Aruba switch/controller/ap combo's).
Juniper comes the closest but there layer7 support (next gen firewalls like Palo's) isn't there yet.
Says the guy that has probably never needed to call Cisco TAC lvl2 about a zero day bug found in a $10 mil+ DC.
So, your argument is that you spent $10M+ on a DC and YOU found a bug and YOU had to call them for support? What does you overpaying have to do with having to call for support on a buggy product? Why would buying a buggy product at all be a good thing? Is your argument "Yeah, they are shitty and over priced, but you can call for support as long as you spend thousand more on another service contract"? Because I prefer products I don't NEED to call support on.
I feel the same way about next/same day onsite support. Is it free? Does the support contract on each of twenty devices for 4 hour part replacement cost more than just having a spare for the 20? If I need more than 5% in spares, that means I am looking for different devices, not same model replacements.
Someone else complained that a $200 pfsense box (plus NICs) was only 5Gb they way they configured it. Setting aside the $200 budget and config mismatch issues, I don't care if I need twice as many links if the CAPEX is a twentieth the cost, OPEX HW contract support is $0 (because I can buy spares under CAPEX and still be cheaper) and the operating labor is trivial if you build your config scripts in the first place.
Amazon will only try to cut costs, not make quality hardware.
So not protected from inside attacks then.
You sound unemployed.
People who buy Cisco gear are not worried about price - They want the reliability.
If Amazon are building their stuff to be cheap, they will not be fighting with Cisco, they will be fighting with TP-Link.
I'd love to see this effort drive down the costs of 10gb+ network speeds and drive them into the consumer market.