Are You Ready to Install White Box Switches in Your Network?
With the development of Cloud services and networking, a series of high performance 40G/100G white box switches have been introduced. The goal is to provide Web scale organizations and service providers more control and flexibility in their data center networks. So what are white box switches? White box switches refers to the ability to use 'generic,' off-the-shelf switching (or white box switching) and routing hardware, in the forwarding plane of a software-defined network (SDN). Moreover, white box switches rely on an operating system (OS), which may come already installed or can be purchased from a software vendor and loaded separately, and then integrate with the deploying organization’s Layer 2/Layer 3 topology and support a set of basic networking features. On the whole, OS is an integral part of white box switches, and the rise of SDN has brought white box switches into the public eye. Next, let’s take a closer look at white box switches. OS Defines White Box Sw...