SDN Themes from ONUG – Let the ASIC go
Edit: I banged this out on the flight home from ONUG four months ago. Just found it in the drafts folder. ONUG's spring 2014 conference in New York is just 3 months away.I was privileged to attend the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Conference, ONUG Academy and mini Tech Field Day event hosted by JP Morgan Chase on October 29 and 30.
I attended at someone else's expense. Disclaimer.
ASICs came up a lot during these couple of days. Following are some ASIC-related things I heard and overheard at ONUG.
Sun Microsystems was overly attached to their SPARC processor (and so was I!) Folks inside Sun made efforts to derail Solaris x86, in order to protect their favorite server platform, and contributed to killing the company altogether. Sad story.
As good as your ASIC is, you'll never keep up with the performance of commodity chipsets. If the whitebox stuff is faster and still good enough to do the job, then it's probably going to win. It's certainly going to cost less. The proprietary ASIC may be better and have more features, but better is the enemy of good enough.
People used to route packets using general-purpose servers Continue reading