51–60 of 97 posts
This is rather cool, and I'm glad to see some work being done in the networking gear space utilizing open designs and firmware like this. Unfortunately, unless I find myself needing to network a datacenter in the near future, it's not immediately useful to me. That said, I do hope other developments in network gear that will be useful in other markets emerge from this effort. From my perspective, there's a gap in net…
Isn't this just wrapping for the COTS switching ASICs or am I missing something big? Almost all "open" projects seem to hit a point where the line between open and closed is quite arbitrary, even if they choose not to see it that way.
"Wrapping commodity ASICs" is worth $4B: http://www.arista.com/ If Facebook wants to give me that value for free I won't complain.
Pretty much the entirety of the Arista userspace is python with all of the magic really in their ASICS. Truly, I've not seen many better engineered pieces of equipment. At the time (I did this > 4 years ago), the Arista switches had dual core AMD Athlons with a few G of ram. They were willing to put more RAM in one, or let us upgrade it. For a so called "vendor product" Arista clearly gets it. They have some really solid Linux guys working for them. When you get the pleasure of using their python apis or pull one apart, it shows that they know what they're doing. It isn't completely insane to think of running apps directly on the switches when they are simply x86_64 Fedora boxes with some fancy asics and a lot of interfaces.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heh maybe not need, but want? I definitely want. Looks like a 40 GbE NIC is just $500: http://www.amazon.com/MELLANOX-CONNECTX-3-56GBE-1PORT-MCX313... Just need an SSD RAID to feed it...
While I wasn't aware you could get them that cheap, I think I'd still look into second hand infiniband for home use. Allows the use of copper for short (pc-to-pc, point-to-point) distances. While optic is absolutely cool, as far as I can tell a single 1m patch cable will cost ~80 USD -- quite a lot considering the cost of the NIC... And even in IBM's sales brochure for their optical switch, infiband comes out a littl…
This is rather cool, and I'm glad to see some work being done in the networking gear space utilizing open designs and firmware like this. Unfortunately, unless I find myself needing to network a datacenter in the near future, it's not immediately useful to me. That said, I do hope other developments in network gear that will be useful in other markets emerge from this effort. From my perspective, there's a gap in net…
I also wanted something in the category you're describing and after shopping around a bit I stumbled across Mikrotik's products. I bought one of their 24 port smart switches and it was exactly what I was looking for. Not a lot more expensive than some of the nicer consumer-targeted gear, but it has way more functionality. http://routerboard.com/CRS125-24G-1S-IN
http://www.mikrotik.com/downloadterms.html
I mean, sure, asking for 45 USD for a CD with the source is technically complying with the GPL -- but it does seem a bit strange in this day and age. Not to mention that for the source code to be useful, one would hope one could build a working routerOS image from it -- and it doesn't appear that the CD will enable a user to build a running image -- and therefore not facilitate changing the product.
But apart from that, my first thought was -- can this thing run BSD -- because pf is quite a bit friendlier than iptables (even if the latter has gotten a lot better lately).
Does anyone know if there are any recommended alternatives to soekris for running a bsd switch/router (preferably running at ~gigabit speeds) ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I wasn't aware you could get them that cheap, I think I'd still look into second hand infiniband for home use. Allows the use of copper for short (pc-to-pc, point-to-point) distances. While optic is absolutely cool, as far as I can tell a single 1m patch cable will cost ~80 USD -- quite a lot considering the cost of the NIC... And even in IBM's sales brochure for their optical switch, infiband comes out a littl…
40GbE uses approximately the same copper cables as Infiniband. There's probably more used IB equipment floating around than used 40GbE, but otherwise I'd go with Ethernet.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mellanox-3-3ft-QSFP-QSFP-Passive-Cop...
Actually seems the price is finally coming down a bit (compared to what I remember these used to cost, years ago -- but maybe I've just upped my budget ;-).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QSFP
"The Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP) is a compact, hot-pluggable transceiver used for data communications applications. It interfaces networking hardware to a fiber optic cable."
But it also interfaces hardware to copper cables, as I gather.
This is rather cool, and I'm glad to see some work being done in the networking gear space utilizing open designs and firmware like this. Unfortunately, unless I find myself needing to network a datacenter in the near future, it's not immediately useful to me. That said, I do hope other developments in network gear that will be useful in other markets emerge from this effort. From my perspective, there's a gap in net…
I've the exact same needs, and by occasion got hold of cisco SG300-10 switch, which I think fits the description - so I thought to share my experience, in case it is useful. I use it for the home lab, where I have a one-armed router serving multiple VLANs, and I have 3x MacMinis running Linux as a "server farm" (The latter I use because they are quite a good gear power-management wise, scaling from ~18W at idle up to…
Isn't this just wrapping for the COTS switching ASICs or am I missing something big? Almost all "open" projects seem to hit a point where the line between open and closed is quite arbitrary, even if they choose not to see it that way.
1) low individual component cost (which is great when you need 100's of them for a datacenter build out) 2) no frills, high throughput non-blocking backplane which are normally only available from the enterprise grade network vendors at top dollar per individual component, and come with a mountain of features and bugs you DONT NEED 3) software defined networking stack: if you can imagine a scenario/feature that would improve your life, nothing but development costs will get in your way. contrast with enterprise vendors, which requires explaining the problem to begin with, and dangling a wad of money explaining how it will be worth their while to develop it
This is rather cool, and I'm glad to see some work being done in the networking gear space utilizing open designs and firmware like this. Unfortunately, unless I find myself needing to network a datacenter in the near future, it's not immediately useful to me. That said, I do hope other developments in network gear that will be useful in other markets emerge from this effort. From my perspective, there's a gap in net…
There are some good cheap managed switches out there. I have a Linksys SFE2000-something 24 port PoE switch for my PoE devices (security cams, IP phone, other stuff) and a TP-Link [something] 16 port switch. Both support basic VLANs, SNMP, etc. I have 1 2port VLAN that connects my cable modem to my router on the TP-Link. From that switch I have 1 port cables to a machine with wireshark, and I can configure that port…
I think what would be ideal is something in the vein of the Linksys SFE2000, with an open-source firmware akin to OpenWRT. AFAIK, that, or something approaching that isn't available. However, I would love to be wrong in that regard.