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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.
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.
For various levels of "Proven" - Cisco today isn't the Cisco of the late 90s and early 2000s. They've now got a lot of products that really don't live up to the legendary brand name.
Their support is good and their core products are good. If you can afford them.
Cisco's real problem is Cisco. They've got that 90s era pricing structure of "Pay out the ass for features, then again for CALs, then again for support." Their sales culture is appalling. They're really out to sell you anything and everything you don't need and don't seem interested in providing you a working solution.
The overall industry trend also runs counter to Cisco's business model. Cisco is rooted in the old school where you set up a very elaborate, very smart network to control your data.
Today bandwidth and processor power is cheap. Really, you just need reliable gear that can pass lots of data and your VM infrastructure takes care of the rest. It's just VM's passing data to each other all day long.
It's just like the server market. Whitebox owns the cloud. Just generic machines designed for maximum value. It doesn't matter if every node is not bulletproof. For every node that fails there are redundant nodes elsewhere that have already taken over.
Network gear, at it's core, are just specialized computers with lots of network ports. They can be white-boxed too.
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.
Cisco have always had a slightly odd business model when it comes to R&D. How often has some mysterious stealth startup been formed to investigate a new idea, with a remarkable number of ex-Cisco people as its initial staff, and subsequently bought by Cisco to bring the technology back in-house if it was promising?
I don't know what you mean by the high-end switch market being a mess. It's still dominated by a few big names, Cisco among them.
For all the promise of SDN, so far it's much more talk than action. The brave few who have tried it at large scales so far have rarely spoken positively about the results. At this level, getting your gear from one supplier who also has you on a lucrative support contract still seems to work out much better in the real world than buying white box gear from that guy, buying another type of white box gear from the other guy over there, installing some Linux-plus-drivers "network OS" from his mate on each of those boxes, and then trying to get 80% complete and 60% working SDN infrastructure running on top. SDN is eating traditional networking alive in the same way that Linux is eating Windows alive on the desktop: only in the dreams of its most loyal fans.
I'm not sure what Docker has to do with switching at any serious level. All the networking other than connectivity between containers/VMs running on the same big box is still hardware based.
And as a final comment, don't be fooled by arguments about big price savings compared to established brands like Cisco. No-one pays anything close to list price at high volume.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.