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> Right now you can buy a whitebox 'switch' with 40gbps interfaces and load various operating systems that enable different management styles (e.g. OpenFlow control like Google http://opennetsummit.org/archives/apr12/hoelzle-tue-openflow...).

This is all very useful for in-building traffic until you get the traffic to the edge of your datacenter/colo/hosting environment network and need to exchange traffic with other ISPs... At which point you need a serious chassis based router with redundancy and full layer 3 capabilities (example: Juniper MX960, Cisco ASR9006 or 9010).

whitebox datacenter switches are a great way to get a lot of 10, 40 and 100 Gbps layer 2 ethernet switch capacity within a datacenter cheaply, they're NOT routers and should not be mistaken with them. They are things that you connect your hypervisor hardware platforms to (example: a whole shitload of 1U servers or facebook/OCP type servers each with dual socket, 16-core xeons in them), is a switch.




It's only a matter of time until whitebox routers exist; Accton recently submitted one to OCP. Then it will take a few years for the software stack to be built.




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