Bare-Metal Switches and Their Customization and Usability in a Carrier-Grade Environment

The current ecosystem of network elements, such as switches and appliances, is largely dominated by devices supplied and sold with a bundled operating system, and software dedicated to manage the device's forwarding hardware, however, these platforms are not open-source and cannot be arbitrarily customized, and there is no cost transparency or flexibility in choosing software different to the bundled components.,,,,In this paper, we explore the capabilities of bare-metal switches, which are equipped with commodity switching hardware components, but shipped without an operating system. We evaluate the feasibility of these commonly lower-cost devices to meet the requirements of a customized, carrier-grade network function. Therefore, we have implemented a prototype on generic hardware, re-using as much open-source software as possible. Our Broadband Remote Access Server (BRAS) prototype can lower the cost compared to proprietary network appliances, and, known to have a hardware backplane capacity of 720 Gbps, the merchant-silicon / ASIC approach can highly outperform the state of the art of current x86-based virtualized network functions, while implementing the most important BRAS features.