All "commodity" servers use Intel processors so Intel isn't really losing anything. Juniper is just sticking their toe in and trying to look cool. Cisco is probably trying to sabotage it from the inside.

Seems like Intel's margins are a good incentive for OCP members to design their own processors. Google has made some noise about that (but I guess that could be a bluff as well) [1].

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/googles-making-chips-now-time-...

Hardware is hard and expensive. I doubt there is enough industry support financially to commit to designing an open source CPU to be compatible with software designed for Intel CPU's. It's just the cost of doing business.

Compatibility isn't what it used to be; all Google software runs on x86, Power, and probably ARM. There are probably a dozen ARM server processors being designed right now, so either there's a huge bubble or the market is big enough.

Not that I disagree with what others have said, but I've found that the bigger the company and the more misleading is the mental model of a company as a single, unique, self conscious entity that would take decision according to its own interest.

Behind companies decisions there are real persons taking decisions or supporting them for their own personal agendas that are not visible from the outside.

The networking giants at least aren't planning on selling hardware for much longer: they want to become purveyors of SDN technology that runs on commodity OCP-style hardware. I am guessing they are part of these initiatives so that they have some influence over what their code runs on.

Who's going to sell hardware if not for the networking giants though? While hardware may be a declining business in terms of revenue it doesn't mean that there's no business either. After all, the big cloud providers will all have to source hardware from someone even if everyone goes whole hog into the OCP ecosystem with cheap, large scale vendors based primarily in low cost of business regions. Who's better equipped to handle economies of scale better than large companies in our world? Did I miss something about manufacturing trends being disrupted in the past 15 years?

If anything, these vendors would want some say on the SDN systems so that their hardware can better integrate with them and offer more compelling value than their competitors.

Network switches are increasingly being based on silicon from companies like broadcom with their Trident and Tomahawk line (what Facebook's six pack use), Intel's Fulcrum chips, Mellanox, or Cavium's Xpliant chips.

An ODM vendor like Quanta makes the equivalent of a "motherboard" for those, and sticks it in a box.

Then you can get software from a vendor like Cumulus which has all the SDN goodness.

Vendors like Cisco, Juniper, or Arista sold all of those as one big product. Whitebox switching is about breaking those up so you can buy them more like you buy your servers.

The idea is to buy the hardware from ODMs like Quanta, Accton, Celestica, Foxconn, etc. They already manufacture all name-brand IT equipment anyway.

> Who's going to sell hardware if not for the networking giants though?

AWS, GCP and Azure will sell you hardware, with a bunch of other services on top.

That makes sense. Is this a case of trading hardware dollars for SDN cents or does it bridge the gap? I have no idea about the economics of this space.

Joining a project is the best way of mucking things up. Apart from that negative viewpoint:

Intel are providing the expensive component (the CPU) so it's in their interest for the complement (the chipset/motherboard/chassis) to be a comodity.

Juniper/Cisco are supplying the network infrastructure, so they want the attached servers to be as cheap as possible.