What is White box switch?

With the development of cloud technology, our requirements for network equipment are simple, flexible, reliable. Meantime, open networking is changing the landscape of the data centers and campus networks by empowering users more flexibility and control with simpler deployment. This is why the increasingly largest data centers nowadays embrace the white box switches.

But what is a white box switch? How is it different from traditional switch,here we can solve your questions.

What is white box switch?

The white box switch (also named white label switch or whitebox hardware, britebox switch) is a network switch without a well-known brand name which assembled from standardized commodity parts.

White box switches mostly have 3 characters:

  • Building on commodity hardware,
  • Using ASICs from established vendors

White box switches may pre-installed with open-source software, but it's more often sold as bare metal hardware. It allows users to purchase hardware from hardware vendors, and then select their preferred network operating system (NOS) from software vendors,leaving users flexibly to choose the switch that best satisfied each particular requirements. It provides a viable alternative, and its open platform simplifies network operations and improves performance, while significantly reducing costs.

White box switches hold in sharp contrast to traditional switches which usually come from a single vendor, such as Cisco, Juniper or Huawei who runs a proprietary networking operating system which often charge a premium for their switches, almost twice or third as much as similar performance britebox switch.

Open network operating system of white box switch

Like mentioned before, NOS is a main difference of white box switches and traditional vendors' switches.

Most white box switches adopt "open" Linux-based NOS, designed to be separated or disaggregated from the underlying hardware, which means that users can change hardware box or NOS at will.

Further to say, when a newer white box hardware launches (or new software),users can replace existing platforms with new platforms even from different vendors.Thus, users can upgrade their hardware and software whenever it's necessary .Compared to traditional network equipment supplier, the whitebox networking produces the possibilities for open-standards-based portable NOS that can run on various switches from different vendors.

White box switch (networking )bring a number of significant advantages for data centers and enterprise networks as following :

  • Simplicity
  • Flexibility
  • Reliability
  • Scalability
  • Automation
  • High performance
  • Cost-effective

Who is Asterfusion and what can we do?

Asterfusion delivers one -stop open networking solution for 10G/25/100G/400G white box switches and SONIC based operating system for next generation data centers and campus and service providers.

The core members of Asterfusion are high position people from Cisco and Huawei with decades of rich experience on route and switch development . Now we own a 180 staff team in China and over 80% are R&D personnel.

sterfusion has a thorough understanding of the needs of the industry,the capability to develop and design our own hardware switches and ONOS , the ability to make continuous contributions in major open source communities and ecosystems and the great mission to re-engineer the cloud networks with whitebox networking .

Our whitebox hardware solutions ：

Asterfusion 's hardware engineer
We produce and design our own hardware , have over 120-software engineer team and 20-hardware engineer team
Asterfusion 's white box switch factory in Suzhou
Our hardware factory in Suzhou
Asterfusion 's white box switch factory in Suzhou
Asterfusion 's white box switch factory in Suzhou
Asterfusion 's white box switch factory in Suzhou
We design and produce our own high performance hardware switches with the shortest lead time (only 2 weeks), offering efficient supply chains to provide the most cost-effective service for our customers .

Two Network Operating System:

AsterNOS: a production ready and feature-rich Enterprise SONiC distribution

SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) is a free and open network operating system based on Linux and developed by Microsoft which nowadays has attracted a large number of industrial chain partners, forming a comprehensive SONiC ecosystem +visit azure.github.io/SONiC/

Asterfusion has officially joined the SONiC community just when its establish , becoming one of the earliest cloud network companies to participate in SONiC community. Adhering to the spirit of open source and openness, Asterfusion actively contributes to the community by a provides feature -rich enterprise SONiCand full series SONiC switches .

FusionNOS :a high-performance software extended data plane for L3-L7 for X86 & ARM64

By combining our open hardware and software solutions together, we provide open source, dissagregation, programmability, cloud native one-stop solution to enterprise, data center and service providers.

Asterfusion believes from traditional vendor lock-in networks into today’s software and hardware disaggregation is an inevitable trend of networking industry.

Let us embrace whitebox networking with Asterfusion！


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