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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

The title is disappointing.

This is about Arista Networks, a Bechtolsheim funded network device company.

The interesting thing is - as near as I can make out - Arista is another software-defined networking company (in this case the software seems to be designed to isolate bugs(?)).

I'm not in the field, but I deal with people who spend large amounts of money on hardware network devices, and it is clear to me (as a software guy) that the whole network device field is going to disrupted by software any day now.

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Arista switches are switches with the actual data path in silicon but with the CNC running on an onboard processor running linux.

It's cool, it's both stupidly fast (wormhole switched, etc) and very configurable. Just costs an arm and a leg.

I think that's pretty much what would be expected at this stage.

High-performance devices will probably require custom silicon for a while yet, but they can charge a premium.

Lower end devices will probably have less custom silicon, more software and be cheaper.

Basically, yeah.

All lower end devices end up with basically same batch of ASIC, anyway just due to cost.

Most switch stuff, however basically comes down to needing more hardware. Cam costs a certain amount, packet buffers cost a certain amount (Or wormhole switching silicon costs a certain amount), etc. None of that you can ever really move into software. At least not decently.

None of that you can ever really move into software. At least not decently.

For pure switches, you might be right (for a while at least). But there is plenty of higher level stuff that is at least partially implemented in silicon (and/or inaccessible software) that is about to be eaten by software.

Things like load-balancing, for example: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/05/20/SoftwareLoadBala...

Good point. I'm not sure what most of that stuff was doing in hardware in the first place, tbh. Haproxy has been better then hardware load balancing for a long time.

What is interesting is the move off cisco's proprietary routing algorithms and into more standard quogga/etc.

I actually don't think it's that expensive per port, I'm not a networking expert, but I've done a cursory look at a few numbers and Arista is relatively inexpensive...maybe even very inexpensive comparatively. :)

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