UPDATED 16:38 EDT / MARCH 10 2016

NEWS

The iPhone experience of networking: How OCP helps companies innovate | #OCPSummit16

Networking hardware represents the bones of the Internet, a necessary support with everything else built around it. Traditionally, this hardware has been big, expensive, and available from only a few massive vendors. That’s changing. The Open Compute Project has worked to make hardware more accessible, and its efforts are paying off. Now, networking hardware is becoming a commodity, cheap and easy to buy or build. This has opened a huge space for innovation from smaller companies.

To gain some insight into the world of networking hardware, Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman, cohosts of theCUBE from the SiliconANGLE Media team, talked to Rob Sherwood, CTO of Big Switch Networks, Inc., at the OCP U.S. Summit 2016 conference.

Hardware as a commodity

The conversation started with Sherwood pointing out how commoditization comes from the bottom up, and the Open Compute Project is a perfect example of that. If a group wants to open up a technology, the first thing they have to do is commoditize the hardware, he said.

Sherwood continued, saying things like Open Compute has made it possible to shift the hardware discussion to build versus buy. For most companies, buying their networking hardware is going to be the right choice, but if a company has specific needs or operates at scale, building their own hardware is now a viable option. This has ended up with a space, he said, where it’s possible to build a networking stack if that’s right for the company.

Innovating for ease of use

All of this commodity hardware, Sherwood said, makes it easier to come up with interesting new architectures. It’s a matter of putting the building blocks out there for people to do what they want. This is a very different networking experience compared to the past.

At Big Switch Networks, Sherwood said, the goal is to provide an “iPhone experience of networking” that’s easy to use so customers don’t have to think about it so much. The larger Open Compute Project is enabling this and making it more acceptable to customers.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OCP U.S. Summit 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU