What makes an ODM network device a “Whitebox”

Introduction

For the last few days I have been professing on twitter that I am not sure the term “whitebox” needs to exist and that the term “brightbox” (branded whitebox) is just a new name for an old concept.

The Situation

ODMs such as Advantech, Quanta along with established vendors such as HP, IBM, Sun (now Oracle) and others have been building equipment for the likes of Cisco, Juniper and essentially the entirety of the networking industry for decades.

These devices were originally considered rebranded, whether it was 3Com rebranding Huawei or Cisco rebranding HP. The fact that they were rebranded ODM devices was a badly hidden secret. The hardware margins were great and everything was going along fine.

Disruption!

In the last few (well at least 8 with Google) years, there has been a move towards sourcing ODM networking devices directly from the ODM and running Open software on them. There is no surprise here and no need to generate a new term.

I think it is key that the networking community understand that these “whitebox” switches are really the same switches they have used and trusted for ages, just without a special brand or specific color. The software though, is a bit newer.

It Would Be Nice..

While it would be nice to just run IOS or JunOS on a ODM switch, it’s not a (at least to my knowledge or public) possibility today. Quite a few companies have sprung up to support the ODM market including pica8 and cumulus. There are also reference network operating systems such as Broadcom Fastpath available that run on switches from Quanta and others. Fastpath has also been modified to become bespoke operating systems for some mid-size networking companies.

Where Are We Headed?

Moving forward I hope to see more focus on network operating systems, or better yet, networking applications on top of generic base operating systems containing the hardware abstraction.