White Box Switch - shawfdong/hyades GitHub Wiki

A white box switch is network switch that is assembled from generic, off-the-shelf switching and routing chips. White box switches tend to be less expensive than brand name switches; but just as fast. A white box switch may come pre-loaded with minimal software or it may be sold as a bare metal device. White box switches are often used in Software-Defined Networking (SDN), an approach to networking in which control plane is decoupled from data plane[1]

The CC-NIE team at UCSC bought a white box switch in March 2015. The switch is a QuantaMesh BMS T3048-LY2R, which is based on the Broadcom Trident+ (BCM56840 Series) switching fabric[2]. QuantaMesh BMS T3048-LY2R is a 1U top top-of-rack switch, with 48x 10GbE SFP+ ports and 4x 40GbE QSFP+ ports[3]. QuantaMesh BMS switches are pre-loaded with ONIE (Open Network Installation Environment), which is a simple extension to the boot load (U-Boot) that provides an environment for installing any Network Operating System (NOS)[4].

A few Network OSes are known to run on QuantaMesh BMS switches, including Cumulus & PicOS[5]. We run PicOS on the QuantaMesh BMS T3048-LY2R switch.

PicOS

PicOS can run in 2 different modes of operation:

Open vSwitch (OVS) mode
In this mode, PicOS is dedicated and optimized for OpenFlow applications
Layer 2 / Layer 3 (L2/L3) mode
In this mode, PicOS can run both switching and routing protocols (XORP) and OpenFlow applications

Further Readings

References

  1. ^ white box switch definition
  2. ^ Jim Warner - Trident+
  3. ^ QuantaMesh 3000 Series BMS T3048-LY2R
  4. ^ Open Network Install Environment
  5. ^ PicOS Overview

Category:Hardware Category:Network

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