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.

Comments

Re:Hardware? We don't need no stinkin hardware.

[blindseer]

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.

Re:Reminds me of Cisco & Linksys...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.