Check out http://netfpga.org/
Ultimately I think such a design would have trouble competing with a network processor (or a switch chip if you're doing something simple).
That is great for research purposes. This platform would use off the shelf PCIe NICs and ram. I think of it as the PostgreSQL of networking gear, cheap and all purpose. It won't have speed or density but it would have robustness and flexibility. Services that currently run on general purpose servers could get targeted towards open network hardware platforms. I don't have any proof, but I don't think there would be shortage of people doing interesting things like making hardware in memory key value stores.
FPGAs would be cost competitive in a system like this. Routing multiple 100MB/s streams of shouldn't be a problem.
Convinced? Maybe a little?
> I don't have any proof, but I don't think there would be shortage of people doing interesting things like making hardware in memory key value stores.
what you are describing are also known as CAM tables. for some preliminary introduction check this out : http://www.pagiamtzis.com/cam/camintro/
How would you compete on port density with PCIe? 72 port 10GbE for 1U (http://gnodal.com/Products/GS-Series/GS7200/) is already available. Once the "pure play nothing but a switch" manufacturers come out this price will be rock bottom.
You are correct, this couldn't initially. What the platform I outlined has is flexibility and cost. But mostly flexibility. Probably the high end of port density would be ~40 (using dual port nics) and this would be for 2u. But you could start to run stuff on the switch that his historically run with ha proxy, varnish, nginx, etc. If there are sata ports, one could code themselves a backblaze pod that doesn't suck and include grep directly on the stata port.
Arista came out last year with something vaguely(although lacking the modularity of cards)similar to what you've got in mind. I think it was originally targeted for high-frequency trading apps where proximity of the colocation such as 350 Cermak in Chicago makes a huge difference in latency. I never heard much more about it though.
http://www.aristanetworks.com/en/products/7100series/7124fx/
What do you think?