What is Bare Metal Switch & Whitebox Switch
This article mainly tells “what is baremetalswitch”, “what are the bare metalswitch vendors”, “the difference between bare metal switch and whitebox switch.” Its prices and development trends. let us read this article by Asterfusion
What Is Bare Metal Switch?
Bare metal switches are pure hardware device come from original design manufacturers (ODMs) which do not have a software preloaded.
Users can independently develop their own applications runs on bare metal switch, such as P4 programmable bare metal switch, which , nowadays is very popular in IT research institutions, academy laboratories and university IT majors.
Or uses can purchase a third-party network operating system (NOS) — like SONiC, Pica8, Cumulus Linux OS, IP infusion, etc. A bare metal switch comes with a boot-loader called the open network install environment (ONIE), which allows you to load an operating system onto the switch.
In fact, servers (sometimes PCS and laptops) have been built this way for years.Users themselves choose the application they want to run, then choose the operating system that can best support the application, and lastly, selects the hardware that can run programs on it.
What Are the Vendors of Bare Metal Switch
Bare metal manufacturers include companies such as Accton, Quanta QCT,Alpha Networks, Delta Computer and Asterfusion Data Technologies.
How about Bare Metal Switch Quality
These companies are also original design manufacturers (ODMs) for many mainstream traditional switch suppliers. In fact, some bare-metal switches that users buy are the same switches they buy from mainstream vendors, just get rid of famous brand and without an operating system but with a much lower price.
What’s the Price of Bare Metal Switch?
With bare metal switches emerge , pricing becomes more transparent and cost-effective. For example, Edge-Core offers a 48 x 10GE + 6 x 100GE network switch for an MSRP of $5000-$5500. Meanwhile, another venor FS ‘s price is about $4100- $4600. Likewise, Asterfusion offers an equivalent 48 x 10GE + 6 x 100GE bare metal switch preloaded with its enterprise SONiC NOS retailing only for $2,599. (support VXLAN and BGP-EVPN ,etc .advancing features) The price is only the half of other manufacturers. Now, with the popularity of bare-metal switching, data center operators of all sizes can purchase high-performance, high-quality switches at a more cost-effective price.
What’s the Difference Between Bare Metal Switch and White Box Switches?
The concepts of white-box switches and bare-metal switches are often confusing. They have a lot in common, and even express the same meaning most of the time.The difference between the two is that a white-box switch has an operating system installed on it. but It’s still an open switch, because the operating system and hardware are not integrated and bundled like traditional switches, which is equivalent to buying a bare metal switch and an operating system in a package. Such as Asterfusion CX-N low latency cloud switch preload with its SONiC NOS, which can be called white box switch.
At the same time, it should be noted that manufacturers who runs open source software on their hardware switch, actually, have no software capabilities. As for Asterfusion, they have formed a software team of more than 100 software engineers to develop their own enterprise SONiC NOS since 2017.At present, its SONiC-based AsterNOS has been iterated to version 4.0.
Asterfusion: 1G-400GbE Bare Metal Switch Vendors
Asterfusion Data Technologies delivers a fully open and highly disaggregated network from 1G-400G white box switches/ bare metal switches with SONiC based operating system for next generation data centers, 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. Asterfusion has a thorough understanding of the needs of the industry, the capability to self-develop SONiC based open network operating system and bare metal hardware, the ability to make continuous contributions in major open source communities and the great mission to “Re-engineer the cloud networks with bare metal switching“.
Asterfusion believes an open-source, virtualized, bare metal approach is the best way to go .
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