This has been a hard-won battle for choice, and the fight is not yet over. So, in theory, companies might be running IOS or NX-OS on various merchant silicon or running merchant NOSes on Cisco Silicon One chippery. Others may follow – IP Fusion, which is commercializing the Vyatta-DANOS stack forged by AT&T, comes to mind. The fun bit now is that not only will Silicon One switch and router ASICs support IOS or NX-OS as necessary, but it looks like they will soon support the DNOS router stack from DriveNets and very likely (we are guessing) the ArcOS switching and routing stack from Arrcus.
The point was these all could run Cisco’s legacy Internetworking Operating System (IOS) or its more recent NX-OS for its Nexus gear. At first, Cisco adopted switch ASICs from Broadcom, Innovium, and Barefoot Networks (now part of Intel) as well as developing its own “Monticello” switch ASICs as well as custom router chips like this one. The success of Trident and Jericho, and Trident’s offshoot for hyperscalers and cloud builders, the “Tomahawk” switch chips which have a smaller feature set and a cheaper price, backed Cisco into a corner. Cisco made big gains in serving but lost share in switching and routing – and among the largest IT buyers in the world. No safe bet stays that way forever, and at exactly the same time just ahead of the Great Recession in 2008 that Cisco was preparing to move into converged server-switching platforms with its “California” Unified Computing System (UCS) platform, Broadcom ramped up its “Trident” merchant silicon for whitebox switching and bought Dune Networks for its “Jericho” line of deep buffer, extensible, switch/router hybrid chips that was the foundation for whitebox routing. And there are those who are reconsidering buying Cisco Silicon or even complete gear in the wake of the Silicon One router and switch chip launches in December 2019 and October 2020, respectively.Ĭisco was the safe bet in networking in the dot-com boom, much as Oracle databases and Sun Microsystems servers for running those databases as well as web and application servers were the safe bet for serving in that time. There are those who do not buy routers or switches from Cisco Systems, one of the early innovators in routing in the late 1980s – when a router was a funky kind of server – that expanded through many acquisitions into switching in the datacenter and on the campus.
The hyperscalers and cloud builders can be split into two camps, but a third one might be emerging.
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