Since the early aughts, (2000’s for you whippersnappers) I’ve believed that the same dynamics that played out in compute and storage must eventually happen in networking too. Moore’s Law, causing general purpose computers to become ever smaller and more powerful plus the open source software community made vertically integrated companies like Digital, Sun, etc. too expensive – but more importantly, unable to keep the innovation pace.
Networking has been, and continues to be, dominated by custom silicon and custom software despite attempts on both the hardware and software portions. My belief is that early projects like quagga have accelerated the software side and one sees companies having some success with “whitebox” hardware, like Cumulus Networks.
However, the hardware component seems to have lagged behind a bit. Recently, work was published about a technique called Key-Value Direct (KV-Direct) using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to improve network performance by an order of magnitude while reducing power consumption by two thirds on a performance per watt basis. The ultra short summary of this work is using commodity hardware and the KV-Direct approach, there could be a giant leap forward in networking. Layer software from a player like Cumulus on top of this, and you’ve potentially found that combination that will catalyze broad commoditization.
The work on KV-Direct is long and entirely worth a read if you’re interested in this sort of thing. Time will tell what impact it has.