
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Sunay Tripathi, Co-Founder and CTO, Pluribus Networks
2014: Vendor Lock-Ins on Data Center Top-of-Rack Access Will Begin To Crumble
As
most of you have already noticed, these are exciting times for the networking
industry. In this article, I will look at Data Center Top-of-Rack (ToR) Switching,
driven by the gradual adoption of 10GbE in the server access, which, I believe,
has been the most dynamic and innovative segment of the whole Ethernet
Switching market over the past five years. Despite falling port prices (-75 percent in five years) and a dramatic
rise in port volumes (~30X over the same period of time), this segment continues
to be dominated by traditional vendors whose business model is predicated on selling
proprietary hardware platforms at a hefty profit margin.
Based
on what I am hearing from our customers and partners today, I believe that in 2014,
we'll finally see signs that the inescapable commoditization of Data Center
Top-of-Rack switches will begin to accelerate, and this segment of networking
will finally be ready to follow in the footsteps of the server market.
I don't want this to be another "empty" prediction, so let's discuss what needs
to happen for this prediction to materialize in 2014.
I think that 2014 will mark the inflection point where merchant silicon, rallying
behind the release of Broadcom's Trident 2, will break away in 10GbE port
market share. Traditional networking players have not been able to keep up with
the torrid pace of innovation set by merchant vendors over the past few years and
all of them, without exceptions, are now forced to embrace the disruptive
economics of merchant silicon. The availability of powerful merchant silicon has
also lowered dramatically the barriers to enter the 10GbE ToR hardware business.
Over the past few years, an increasing number of white label vendors have been
offering low-cost ToR switches.
The
key question is: what has prevented merchant silicon-based white boxes to go
mainstream despite radically better market economics? The answer is software. Enterprise-class network operating systems are the single
biggest advantage of the incumbents and the single biggest weakness for white
boxes. While the incumbents have perfected over the years their network
operating systems, the software on white boxes continues to lag behind in
quality and L2/L3 functionalities.
I
expect 2014 to mark the beginning of a sea change in network operating systems
for white-label hardware. Enterprise-quality, feature-rich network operating systems
will emerge. Business models will evolve towards software monetization, the
high profit margins commanded by the incumbents will erode, and, finally, the ToR
hardware market will march down the same commoditization path of the computing
a decade ago.
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About the Author
Before Pluribus, Sunay Tripathi was a senior distinguished
engineer for Sun Microsystems and also, the chief
architect for Kernel/Network Virtualization in Core Solaris OS. He has an
extensive 20+ year software background, and was one of the top code
contributors to Solaris. Tripathi holds more than 50 patents encompassing
network and server virtualization.