The only viable merchant silicon chip that would be useful for a IXP is from the StrataDNX-family which house the jericho/qumran/petra/arad chips from broadcom. No packetbuffer in the exhangepoint will shred performance significantly, especially when one of your bursty 100G customers starts sending data into 1/10G customers.
To the best of my knowledge the only one that offers DNX in whitebox-fashion is Agema and Edgecore. But why whitebox? Except on a very few occasions whitebox is just "i like paying hardware and software on different invoices = whitebox" the TCO is just the same but. As an exchangepoint i also see that it can hard to reap the benefits of all the hipstershit going on in these NOS-startups, you want spanning-tree, port-security, something to loadbalance over links and perhaps a overlaying-technology if the IXP becomes to big and distributed, like vxlan. This is to easy almost. Whenever i see unbuffered mix-speed IXPs i ask if i can pay 25% of the portcost since that is actually how much oumpfff i would get through the port. // hugge @ 2603 > 20 aug. 2017 kl. 18:40 skrev Bill Woodcock <wo...@pch.net>: > > Why don't we just swap out your 40g switch for a 100g switch? You've had the > 40g one for a while, and we anticipate upgrades every 18-24 months. > > -Bill > > >> On Aug 20, 2017, at 08:46, Mike Hammett <na...@ics-il.net> wrote: >> >> I first sent to an IX-specific mailing list, but as I have yet to see the >> message hit the list, I figured I would post it here as well. >> >> We've had multiple requests for 100G interfaces (instead of Nx10G) and no >> one seems to care about the 40G interfaces we have available. >> >> Looking at cost effective options brings us to whitebox switches. Obviously >> there's a wide range of hardware vendors and there are a few OSes available >> as well. Cumulus seems to be the market leader, while IPinFusion seems to be >> the most feature-rich. >> >> We're not doing any automation on the switches at this time, so it would >> still need decent manual configuration. It wouldn't need a Cisco-centric CLI >> as we're quite comfortable managing standard Linux-type config files. We're >> not going all-in on some overlay either given that we wouldn't be replacing >> our entire infrastructure, only supplementing it where we need 100G. I know >> that LINX has gone IPinfusion. What OS would be appropriate for our usage? >> I'm not finding many good comparisons of the OSes out there. I'm assuming >> any of them would work, but there may be gotchas that a "cheapest that meets >> requirements" doesn't quite unveil. >> >> Any particular hardware platforms to go towards or avoid? Broadcom Tomahawk >> seems to be quite popular with varying control planes. LINX went Edgecore, >> which was on my list given my experience with other Accton brands. >> Fiberstore has a switch where they actually publish the pricing vs. a bunch >> of mystery. >> >> Thoughts? >> >> >> >> >> ----- >> Mike Hammett >> Intelligent Computing Solutions >> http://www.ics-il.com >> >> Midwest-IX >> http://www.midwest-ix.com >
