Going back to Linux, fact is using Linux on a bare metal switch today is like using Slackware in 1995. The need for a more turn-key Linux distro, with better apps (better routing, telemetry, ...etc) is needed to compliment white box hardware today. For a long time the HW has been the limiting factor since most merchant PFE platforms supported <50k FIB entries. Now with 1M+ (on chip) around the corner, SW quality and scale will need to improve accordingly.

I didn't say it was OpenFlow everywhere. I meant custom software in some way (i.e. not an off the shelf Juniper/Cisco/whatever). OpenFlow has pretty narrow use cases once you dump reactive flows so it's definitely rare in the wild.

For other customers using whitebox switches with different OS's booted, look at whoever is paying companies like Cumulus/Big Switch.

Also see Project Calico for containers, they use the linux kernel as FIB, but obviously they could just as well use OpenFlow to program switches for bare metal machines (which then might run containers).

This is very different than a TOR switch or core-router running OpenFlow. Only a few places are running more than a couple thousand VMs in a single SDN, and its nothing like what is being discussed above.

But if you need the big guns there are a ton of OpenStack Neutron plugins, OpenDaylight being one of them (networking-odl) and there are the classical/traditional vendor ones (Cisco, Arista, and so on).

I think the future is very much means this jungle of APIs integrating in whatever tangled ways, and eventually the reliable, robust and sane ones will prevail.

Well handling the routes themselves can be offloaded to regular servers. The issue is indeed managing the forwarding tables. "Something something aggregation, non contiguous bitmasks, NDA" runs wildly for the door. :)

There are plenty of boards that will hold 750Mbs of RAM from the usual folks - DELL, HP and Supermicro. So why is there no viable option? Also this is a hardware concern. How does choice of open source solution - Vyatta, Qugga or Bird matter?

What is the issue?

Full tables in FIB.

https://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=s902223

This is all very useful for in-building traffic until you get the traffic to the edge of your datacenter/colo/hosting environment network and need to exchange traffic with other ISPs... At which point you need a serious chassis based router with redundancy and full layer 3 capabilities (example: Juniper MX960, Cisco ASR9006 or 9010).

whitebox datacenter switches are a great way to get a lot of 10, 40 and 100 Gbps layer 2 ethernet switch capacity within a datacenter cheaply, they're NOT routers and should not be mistaken with them. They are things that you connect your hypervisor hardware platforms to (example: a whole shitload of 1U servers or facebook/OCP type servers each with dual socket, 16-core xeons in them), is a switch.

Not _that_ kind of router. The type of router connected to you cable modem is a box that performs NAT, not IP routing.