The rise of white-box switches

With all the hubbub around software-defined networking and white-box network switching, it’s time to gauge the impact these new trends will have on both data center deployments and the switching market in the coming years.

Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing at Pica8, and Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research, have teamed up to forecast the growth of SDN and white-box switching adoption rates. The future may not be here yet, but it’s coming. –Paul Venezia

White box switches in the new data center

The phrase “white box” has long been used to apply to no-name computers. The same ODMs (original design manufacturers) that produced them are getting into the game of manufacturing white-box switches. White-box switches look just like any other switch — and their manufacturers will be familiar to those who have purchased white-box servers: Accton, Celestica, Quanta Computer, and so on.

White-box switches are getting more attention in next-gen data center deployments, as a number of software-defined networking (SDN) startups offer solutions that include them. Enterprises are wondering how white-box switches will impact their data center plans.

Software defines the box

White-box switches are useless without software — every switch needs an operating system. This OS needs to seamlessly integrate with existing L2/L3 topologies and support a basic set of features. Beyond this, there should be new capabilities delivered as a result of “opening up” the network switch.

White-box switches must first and foremost have hardware-agnostic network operating systems. This enables an abstraction layer on the bare-metal switch, just like Linux and Windows provide on the server side. White boxes are ideal for Linux-based OSes. Linux offers so many advantages (including open/free tools like GCC, a native environment for Python, and the ability to compile your own app on board) that it’s far and away the best foundation for reaping the benefits of white-box switching.

How do you put the OS on the metal? Some vendors sell a complete solution with the OS already installed on the white box, while others set up distributors to provide the metal — and you buy the OS direct from the software vendor. Both approaches have merit, depending on the scale of the deployment and the desire to have a single or dual source of accountability.

Beyond the operating system, white-box switches are more valuable if they interact with SDN controllers. In fact, the best switch OS products have interfaces to multiple controllers. When we talk about controllers, many people think of OpenFlow, but in reality vCenter Orchestration from VMware is a controller (something has to “control” the VM lifecycle). A key attribute of white-box switch OSes is the ability to plug into OpenStack or into open source OpenFlow controllers like Ryu, Floodlight, or most recently Open Daylight.

The growing market for white-box switches

What does the market look like for white-box switches? We’ll start by looking at the overall Ethernet switch market. Within that market, we’ll drill down to the cloud (Web 2.0, portals, and hyperscale) and enterprise segments separately, since their trajectories and technology adoption rates vary.

Overall, the data center Ethernet switch market has seen tremendous growth and investment over the past four years, despite a constrained IT spending environment (see Figure 1). This revenue growth is even more impressive given the shift to fixed, top-of-rack switch architectures at the expense of more pricey, modular, chassis-based data center switches. Fixed, top-of-rack deployments far outpaced the overall data center switch market, with revenues more than tripling.

White boxes in the cloud

The cloud segment of the Ethernet switch market has seen exponential expansion as new companies, business models, and services are underpinned and enabled by massive data center networking infrastructures. Crehan Research estimates that in 2012 the total cloud segment accounted for about 4 million data center Ethernet switch ports — including OEM switch brands such as Arista, Cisco, Dell, IBM, and Juniper, as well as white-box switches.

Although a few very large cloud data center companies have deployed white-box data center switches, the majority currently uses OEM-branded data center switches. In large deployments, the price delta between white boxes and discounted, OEM-branded switches may not offer a compelling enough reason to shift to the white-box model. Conversely, in many smaller deployments, the scale may not be sufficient to make white-box economics work. Nonetheless, the level of interest in white boxes and the number of offerings continue to rise.

Crehan Research expects that the cloud market will see about a 25 percent shipment CAGR (compound annual growth rate) over the next five years, growing from less than 4 million ports in 2012 to 12 million-plus ports in 2017. This segment will likely see at least a gradual increase in white-box deployments. Combining these two factors results in a 32 percent shipment CAGR and a forecast of close to 5 million data center Ethernet white-box switch ports deployed in the cloud market segment by 2017 (see Figure 2).

White boxes in the enterprise

The enterprise data center switch market is rife with change and innovation. Over the past decade or so, enterprise data centers have moved from distributed to consolidated, physical to virtual, siloed to converged. At the same time, these data centers have had to handle a step-function shift in the demand curve for network traffic and storage, in conjunction with a flood of new client devices in the form of smartphones and tablets. And all of this while working with legacy infrastructures, since few of us have the luxury of starting over with a clean slate.

Along with these changes, we’re seeing the transition from general-purpose switches deployed in data centers to switches specially built for the data center. This is shown by Cisco’s transition from Catalyst (a general-purpose switch that can be used for the data center) to Nexus (a switch specifically built for the data center) and the rise of data center switch specialist Arista Networks.

As Figure 2 shows, even with a much slower growth rate than the cloud, we still expect the enterprise to remain a majority of the data center Ethernet switch market through 2017. Within this market we expect to see much slower adoption of white-box switches because of factors such as more diverse environments, longer and closer ties to existing switch vendors, end-to-end or full solution purchases, and vendor-provided value-added services such as technical support. Furthermore, with an average data center switch lifecycle in the enterprise in excess of four years, we need to keep in mind that a migration to new deployment models will be gradual for this segment as a whole.

How it all adds up

Combining both the enterprise and cloud white-box adoption curves results in Crehan’s prediction of 3 million ports in 2014 or 7 percent of overall shipments. By 2017, we forecast that this will have increased to over 8 million ports or 15 percent of total data center switch port shipments.

While we believe adoption of white-box switches will be gradual, they will form an important part of the data center landscape over the coming years. SDN will flourish with open systems, and white-box switches will be an important part of that growth.

New Tech Forum provides a means to explore and discuss emerging enterprise technology in unprecedented depth and breadth. The selection is subjective, based on our pick of the technologies we believe to be important and of greatest interest to InfoWorld readers. InfoWorld does not accept marketing collateral for publication and reserves the right to edit all contributed content. Send all enquiries to newtechforum@infoworld.com.

This article, “The rise of white-box switches,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.