Datacenter Network Switches
Comments discuss hardware like Broadcom ASICs in switches, software-defined networking, whitebox designs, and custom solutions by hyperscalers such as Google and Facebook, often debating hardware vs. software roles in modern data centers.
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Don't they run on commodity Broadcom ASICs?
Aren't Broadcom network switching SOC the industry standard?
Ha! yeah that's done in hardware. They are talking about the controller that sets the route tabels for the asics.
It's all at the big cloud service providers. Not as much focused on the physical network (as originally imagined), but in the overlay networks. Seethe various DPUs like Intel IPU, Nvidia/Mellanox Bluefield, etc. Nvidia DOCA even uses OvS as the sort of example out of the box software to implement networking on Bluefield. When your controller is Arm cores 5 cm away on the same PCB doing per connection setup is no longer as absurd ;)
No, they use whitebox switches and software defined networks to control. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4gOZrUwWmc [Edit: oops, fixed!]
Google (and I'm sure all others) use Optical Switches for yearshttps://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/the-evolution-o...
Switches have sophisticated hardware on both low and high ends, but many widely used entry level L3 switches are essentially nothing more than large amount of ethernet NICs connected to single CPU (sometimes with hardware acceleration which usually means specialized DMA engine). This is even more true for routers (some Cisco platforms even have various acceleration hardware that their software simply does not use).
there isn't as much exotic "stuff" as you might think. they have the same ODMs build switches and line cards to their specifications, with chips from the same vendors (Broadcom, Cavium, etc) only they can easily hire a team and sign the NDA and write/optimize/perfect the forwarding plane and control plane implementations.hell, the IS-IS implementation in Quagga is usable because of Google :)
No, he's saying "the chips are in the switches, but networking vendors may not have mature support in the operating system". Think Cisco IOS as an example of the software that has to support the protocol in addition to what the silicon can do.
No, it's a competitor to Arista, Cumulus, Pica8, OcNOS, FBOSS, etc.