Slashdot Mirror
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.
Cisco is just power of a name soon a new name will step up and challenge
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.
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.
Prime members have their packets delivered in 2 nanoseconds or less.
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.
Especially with upstarts like Ubiquiti Networks entering with ridiculously inexpensive hardware good features and easy to use management software.
I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon just buys them as their entry into the market.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
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.
I heard the same thing about John Deere growing up. That John Deere was just green paint and a lot of snobbery.
Here's what I learned, farmers and ranchers are businessmen. They need to get work done like every other business. Downtime costs money. John Deere tractors still break down, get stuck in the mud, wear out, etc. It's that the competition do this more often. There's still some snobbery and such in there, John Deere tractors can have leather seats and built in refrigerator. They spend the money on the "green paint" because it gives them more return on their investment.
Is Cisco just a name? Maybe that's true now but they can only get to be "a name" by proving to be better over time. No one Is GMC just a name? Is Apple? Businessmen buy this stuff because it makes them money. If Cisco stops making people money, or rather they can make more money with someone else, then Cisco will disappear. Same goes for Apple, John Deere, and GMC.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
If Amazon uses their own switch to power their own super huge datacenter... that's a solid argument that those switches actually works!
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.
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.
Well, at least until their recent fascination with DRM in their equipment.
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?
Cisco maintained their position largely due to their upstream training and certification. They haven't been any better then the competition and they are worse in many ways.
Cheap storage VM.
... so long as you don't mind waiting 6 weeks for an RMA when your Ubiquiti unit fails. Never again.