How to define whiteboard switchboard

A new generation of white data center switchboard

The word "white card" is about a long time no brand of computer. ODMs (original design houses) that make white computers have also started the production of white-label switches. Making white cards look just like any other brand of switch, and the makers of those white cards are familiar to users who bought white cards, such as Accton, Celestica, Quanta, and others.

Because many SDN start-ups offer solutions that include white-label switches, white-label switches are receiving more attention as they deploy next-generation data centers. Large businesses are considering what impact white-box exchange opportunities have on their data center plans.

There is no software whiteboard switch is not available, each switch requires an operating system. This OS requires seamless integration of existing L2 / L3 topologies and supports a basic set of features. In addition, because of the "openness" of network switches, there should be some new features.

Whiteboard switches First and foremost, you must have a hardware-independent operating system. The only way to make the abstraction layer on a bare metal switch work like a Linux on a server and Windows is. The ideal operating system for white card devices is Linux OS. Linux offers many advantages, including open source / free tools such as GCC, Python's native environment, and the ability to compile self-developed applications on the board, without doubt making it the foundation for the best use of whiteboard switches.

But how can we put the OS on a bare metal? Some vendors sell white-boxed solutions that have been pre-installed with OS, while others only sell bare-metal. Users need to buy OS directly from software vendors. The two methods have their own merits, which one depends on the scale of the deployment, and secondly on whether the user wishes to have one provider or two providers take responsibility.

In addition to the operating system, whiteboard switches play a bigger role if they interact with SDN controllers. In fact, the best switch OS products generally have multiple controller interfaces. When we talk about SDN controllers, many people think of OpenFlow, but in fact VMware's vCenter Orchestration is also a controller (a device that "controls" the lifecycle of virtual machines). A key feature of Whiteboard Switch OS is the ability to connect to OpenStack or OpenFlow controllers such as Ryu, Floodlight, or, more recently, popular OpenDaylight.

Whiteboard switch market is gradually growing

White card switch market status? Then let's take a look at the overall Ethernet switch market. In this market, you need to separately count the cloud (Web 2.0, portals and very large-scale networks) and the enterprise market, because the development path and technology adoption rate of the two are very different.

Overall, the data center Ethernet market has seen tremendous growth and significant investment over the past four years, despite the overall limited spending environment for IT (see Figure 1). This revenue growth is even more impressive as it moves away from the more expensive, modular rack-mounted data center switches to the fixed overhead switches (ToRs). Fixed-roof switch deployments grew far faster than the market for overall data center switches, which roughly tripled revenues.

White card switch in the cloud

The cloud-involved segment of the Ethernet switch market is experiencing an exponential growth as new businesses emerge and new business models and services gain technical support due to the massive data center network infrastructures. Crehan Research estimates the total number of Ethernet switch ports for cloud data centers in 2012 to be about 4 million, including OEM switch brands such as Arista, Cisco, Dell, IBM, Juniper, and white label switch vendors.

While some of the very large cloud data center organizations have deployed white data center switches, most are still using OEM branded data center switches. In many large deployments, the price gap between white-box switches and discounted OEM-branded exchanges is not large enough to attract large numbers of corporate customers to switch to white cards. In many small deployments, its size is not enough to give full play to the economic benefits brought by white card switches. In spite of this, the interest in whiteboard switches and the number of related solutions are on the rise. Crehan Research estimates that in the next five years, the CAGR in the cloud switching market will reach 25%, from less than 4 million ports in 2012 to more than 12 million ports in 2017. In this market, at least you can see the gradual growth of deployment of white card machine. By combining these two factors, CACR at the data center white-matter Ethernet switch ports in the cloud switching market will reach 32% by 2017, approaching 5 million ports. (See Figure 2)

Whiteboard switch in the business

Enterprise data center switch market is full of change and innovation. In the past decade or so, the evolution of enterprise data centers has evolved from being decentralized to centralized, from physical to virtual, from isolation to convergence. At the same time, enterprise data centers must also manage the dramatic growth of network traffic and storage demand curves as new client devices such as smartphones and tablets are emerging. And all this has to be done with the existing infrastructure because few businesses can afford to de-design their own data center from scratch.

Accompanied by these changes, we see that data centers are beginning to move from general switch deployments to private switch deployments. This can be seen from Cisco's transition from Catalyst (general purpose switch) to Nexus (private data center switch), as evidenced by the rise of data center switchboard specialist Arista.

As shown in Figure 2, while data center switches are growing at a much lower rate than cloud switches, we can still expect that the data center Ethernet switch market will still be the bulk of the overall switch market by 2017. In this market, we expect the adoption rate of white-label switches to grow even more slowly as businesses have a more diverse and complex environment with longer-term and closer relationships with existing switch vendors, requiring the purchase of end-to-end Or a comprehensive solution, as well as manufacturers provide a variety of value-added services such as technical support and so on.

In addition, the average lifecycle of data center switches in the enterprise is generally more than four years, which means that the migration to the new deployment model can only be a gradual process for the enterprise data center switch overall market.

Future prospects

Taking the curve of whiteboard switches in the enterprise and in the cloud together, Crehan predicts that the whiteboard switch port will be 3 million in 2014 or 7% of the overall data center switch port shipments. By 2017, this number will grow to 8 million ports, or 15% of the total port shipments. Although we think the adoption of whiteboard switches is a gradual process, in the coming years, they will be an important part of the data center layout. With the booming development of SDN and open systems, white-label switches will also become an important factor in promoting this development.

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