Fiberstore is rolling out some CRAZY cheap 100Gbps switches, and I'm curious if anyone in the community has any thoughts or real-life world experience with them.
For the price point, it's almost in the "too good to be true" category.
Naturally it claims to support an impressive range of features including BGP, IS-IS, OSPF, MPLS, VRFs, blah blah blah.
There was an earlier discussion about packet buffer issues, but, assuming for a second that it's not an issue, can anyone say they've used these and/or the L2/L3 features that they purportedly support?
Fiberstore is rolling out some CRAZY cheap 100Gbps switches, and I'm curious if anyone in the community has any thoughts or real-life world experience with them.
For the price point, it's almost in the "too good to be true" category.
The price is on par with the hardware cost of other whitebox Tomahawks, e.g. Edge-Core 32x100G models like the AS7712 or AS7716 that also runs the BCM56960, so the primary distinction seems to be that you get a NOS included in that price. I have zero experience with Broadcom's ICOS as opposed to the other options on the market, so it seems to be a question of whether you're happy with that or would be e.g. paying Cumulus or $vendor a few K USD for a license for their NOS on it.
With DC-DC power supplies there's a number of things that actually have
input ranges of 36-72VDC. Way higher DC voltage than you'll ever see a
48VDC telecom battery system at "float" voltage, anyhow.
Fiberstore is rolling out some CRAZY cheap 100Gbps switches, and I'm curious if anyone in the community has any thoughts or real-life world experience with them.
For the price point, it's almost in the "too good to be true" category.
The COGS on a single ASIC tomahawk switch was is in $5000-7000 range. so it's consistent with a low value add reseller of merchant silicon. that silicon is getting older (tomahawk 3 was announced in anticipation of 2018) so we can presume they are getting cheaper. I generally have a favorable experience of FS but then I buy optics and cables, not switches so your mileage may vary.
Naturally it claims to support an impressive range of features including BGP, IS-IS, OSPF, MPLS, VRFs, blah blah blah.
The software stack is Broadcom ICOS. if you're not familiar with that I start looking at that. if it meets you needs that's cool. if not you might be looking at cumulus or onos. That said Broadcom does enough to get their customers (whitebox odms) out the door, not necessarily the customers of those odms so your recourse to a developer is kind of limited which you get a from a vendor more involved in the software stack. A lot of those choices here depend on how responsible you want to be for what's running inside the box.
There was an earlier discussion about packet buffer issues, but, assuming for a second that it's not an issue,
It can be avoided, but for people used to running all 10Gb/s cut-through trident 2s kind of hot, some of consequences are kind of impressive. 4 much smaller buffers and the virtual assurance that you'll be doing rate conversion eats into the forwarding budget.
You may have better results with the same question on OCP (open compute
platform) related forums and mailing lists. The Quanta version of that
switch sold by FS is pretty much the same thing:
Quanta has been very active in the OCP community for whitebox switches. I
have heard that they are the switch manufacturer for a great deal of
Facebook's hyperscale stuff.
I smell some BS here, at least in their 'Verified Purchase' reviews:
"It is installed as a network hub in my basement and it is working fine. Great quality product. I've had a lot of business with FS for years. This is a very reliable company and they stand behind their company's products with a first class warranty! I highly recommend."
"It just takes several days to receive my 100G switch with Broadcom ICOS which is packaged safely and intactly. I followed the instruction and seems simple for a non-tech user. Three steps would be done: plug it in, cable it up, turn it on. Just the way a good product should be. I would like to recommend both the product and the seller."
Non tech user, network hub in my basement. $10K L3 switch. Jesus. The Tactical Flashlight seems more believable right now.
I've got a few older quanta switches still around, they're running a fairly old version of Broadcom's Fastpath software on top of vxworks 5.x.
Fastpath runs ospf and ospfv3 just fine, exports sflow, makes the hardware do everything you'd expect a l3 switch to do. The CLI is kinda quirky, but it works.
I'm not sure how much they've changed since then, but from what I understand the software is mainly just a reference spec to go along with the reference hardware designs you can get from Broadcom. Then the company designing/manufacturing the actual switch could/would build something on top that, tailored to any customizations beyond the ref design they added.
Haven't had any problems with them, although the documentation Quanta provided was almost useless - par for the course with them from what I've heard..
3 different people from supposedly 3 countries added pictures of the bag. To me it looks like the bag is on the exact same table in all photos,
under totally same lighting conditions, just shot from different angles. Also, there is a dent in the table, which is visible in 2 of the photos.
I wonder, why would they do this? Doesn't instill a lot of confidence in me.