Routers are deployed at a large scale at various points in the Internet and provide several services from basic IP routing to network access to secure interconnection services (VPNs). There hasn’t been a major inflection point in this space either in software or hardware for several decades and it is ripe for disruption.
Merchant silicon has made its way into router roles in the past few years with carrier-class capabilities providing ever increasing scale & performance with every new generation. Leveraging these advancements, whitebox platforms are further challenging the incumbents by standardizing their hardware designs, offering dense fixed form-factors, and chassis-based routing solutions. Additionally, new scale-out architectures to disaggregate large, power hungry, rigid chassis are coming to the forefront. Furthermore, we are in the midst of several network architecture and business delivery model transformations – growing peering points, increasing BGP speakers, centralized route controllers, and CLOS architectures are some such examples. These changes demand a modern routing software-based solution that is built for scale, programmability and lends itself to providing rich visibility.
In this talk, we will examine some of the above trends closely and look at why traditional approaches need re-thinking to meet the needs of the modern networking infrastructure tier. Also, for this new approach, a.k.a. Whitebox, we will review the possible Whitebox solution using Network Operating System. Also, we will introduce some applications for Whitebox solution based on Arrcus ArcOS use cases as example.
