Threatening the market by “Wedge”? I don't think so.

A grass next to Taipei Botanical Garden (台北植物園), Taiwan

I just don't get it. Products such as iPhone/iPad are totally proprietary. And people still love them. Network devices are also proprietary. However, people just don't like proprietary network boxes and want them all to become as open as commodities?

Last Wednesday (June 18, 2014) Facebook announced the existence of their experimental in-house Top of Rack 40Gbps switch called “Wedge”. The basic ideas in many reports from the press (like this, this, and this) are: this would threaten existing market of network vendors such as Cisco.

Bandwidth (Throughput) is not everything about network performance

A look along the Coconut Palm Avenue (椰林大道).
National Taiwan University.

We like to compare the "bandwidth" numbers of different network systems. In my experience, bandwidth is the most asked property when I am introducing new technologies to other network workers. Bandwidth is very easy for people to understand, to do the calculations, and to compare which one is better than the others.

However, bandwidth is just not everything. Network with larger bandwidth is simply not a faster network at all.

Here I crafted an imaginary example, to show you why bandwidth is not as important as you might think of.

This imaginary example is called: "Trans-Pacific High Bandwidth Pipe".

Northbound, Southbound, and East/Westbound. What do they mean?

We hear a lot of directions when we are talking about Data Center technologies: Northbound, Southbound, and even Eastbound/Westbound. What do they mean? Why are they called this way?

Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Source: Wikipedia

For minimum discussion of SDN, three layers are defined inside an SDN. They are SDN Service Layer, Controller, and Physical Network.