ONIE: Why It Is Special for Bare Metal Switch?
Have you ever wondered that one day you could customize switches like the way you configure your own PC? It is actually happening. As vendors researches and develops switch structures by decoupling software from hardware, bare metal switch come into being. The switching technology can be programmed like Cumulus Linux servers. They may appear in a lot more average enterprises in the next few years with ONIE moving into the spotlight. Clearing the Fog Around Bare Metal Switch Bare metal switch, also known as white-box switch, is solely a switch box with a chip inside it. What makes it differ from original network switch ? Well, common Ethernet switches, also called closed switches, are sold with hardware and software together. That is to say, if you buy a Juniper EX or MX series network switches, you also buy JUNOS; if you buy a Cisco Catalyst network switch, you have to buy Cisco IOS. This is in contrast to bare metal switches which widen the choice available to network buyers. The...