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Comment by Trisell | Hacker News Reader

The networking field, as with the server hardware field, is seeing a movement towards commodity hardware. Custom network silicon is expensive to develop, and no longer is returning the investment that it did. This is cause companies like Juniper and Cisco to look at ways to expand their profits, while essentially making nothing on the hardware.

Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device. So a company could buy 50 white box switches and slap IOS or JUNOS on them.

In the networking world OSs are even more religious then the Microsoft Linux debates of the past. I know networking shops that will never buy anything but Cisco because they only know how to network on Cisco and they refuse to learn anything else. That is the market that Cisco is going to target.

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> Cisco along with others are looking by at things like licensing the IOS to run on any device.

ios is a custom-rtos for a custom machine (running on mips mostly). it runs control plane for your routers/switches etc. why would you want to run it on a non-csco/vanilla x86 boxes ? unless you can _somehow_ make control-plane h/w agnostic (easier said than done) i don't really see much value in doing this.

You may not. But large enterprises that pay billions a year for networking gear, who can save a billion by buying whitebox, and still get that Cisco feel that they have spent years training and acquiring expertise will and already are. It may not be IOS. But Cisco will come out with something that feels and operates like IOS that runs on x86. Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86.

Between whitebox and SDN. These companies won't be selling hardware for the 1-200% markup the have enjoyed all these years.

> Juniper has already ported it's JUNOS to run on x86.

huh :) i was/am under the impression that with junos, juniper started with freebsd as the core, and then added lot's of stuff to it, specifically in control-plane and a bunch of kernel extensions as well.

if that is true, they were already x86 compatible...

with cisco things are very different. i don't think ios ever ran on a bare-metal x86. this is not for the lack of trying though (if you know folks who have worked on ios, check with them, writing about it here, doesn't seem right)

Junos has run on x86 for years - Juniper had i686 control planes in some devices. As well as PPC and a few different kinds of MIPS (Octeon, XLR) - although those are usually data plane.

Newer products use virtualization, i.e. running the FreeBSD-based Junos control plane in a VM.

The very first juniper ever was basically a freebsd box glued to a bunch of custom ASIC and line cards. The m40. It has always been x86 and now x86-64.

Not much difference I'm afraid. IOS-XE is essentially the product of porting the classic IOS and runs it as a controlling process that sits top of linux, and with dedicated forwarding path.

If you look up for IOU, which stands for IOs over Unix, it has been around for quit a long time.

I've seen some older Cisco storage switches which utilised Pentium 4 CPUs and SAN-OS instead of the usual custom built Motorola processors for the non-ASIC components of the device.

> ios is a custom-rtos for a custom machine (running on mips mostly).

this is true for legacy IOS, the "new" IOS-XE and IOS-XR could run on top of linux, in fact IOS-XR 6.0 could run in a linux container: http://www.cisco.com/assets/global/DK/seminarer/pdfs/XR60.pd...

>. why would you want to run it on a non-csco/vanilla x86 boxes ?

AWS, for instance, with the CRS1000V. Though, I think that is IOS-XE and Linux based. IIRC, they are moving to IOS-XE/XR which is more Linux based and can be run on COTS boxes.

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