White box switches have been around for years, but adoption has been limited to niche companies that have large engineering departments. The rise of software-defined networking ( #SDN ) has brought them into the public eye, though, as a lower-cost alternative to traditional network hardware. In fact, some of the early messaging around SDN revolved around using white boxes as a complete replacement for all network hardware. Despite the promise that SDN brought, the use of white boxes has been limited for a couple of reasons. The first is that historically, any organization that wanted to leverage a white box switch needed to have a number of technical specialists that many enterprises do not have. This would include network programmers and engineers fluent in #Linux. These skills are commonly found in companies such as #Facebook, #Google and #Amazon, but not so much in your average enterprise.
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