What’s a pirate’s favorite switching platform?
Arr-cus. 😂
And before I make a joke about networking ship-sets (too late), I’ll move onto what Arrcus is and why you should be checking them out!
Arrcus manufactures white box switches running ArcOS, their latest generation of switches leveraging the Jericho-2 chipset.
Touting a microservices architecture, multi-tenancy at scale, and open integration across multiple ODM vendors, ArcOS offers up a hardware agnostic platform that finds it home in data center fabrics, large scale peering/edge deployments, and cloud deployments.
With support for OpenConfig and YANG, Arrcus intends for users to leverage APIs for operations and management in modern fashion, no slumming it with old school CLI (although there is one should you choose to use it).
With claims of up to 100 million (that’s 100 meeeeellion) BGP paths and carrier grade class hardware, the OS also provides streamed telemetry data for multiple purposes, including monitoring device health and workload mobility. Arrcus also takes advantage of streaming telemetry in BGP route validation, comparing real time data with RPKI lookups and sending notifications to operators of potentially hijacked routes.
Support for BGP-LSVR is also part of the ArcOS platform. Which if you don’t live in carrier land, you might have just said “huh?” (because that’s what I said as well). BGP-LSVR is a IETF draft standard for augmenting BGP with Shortest Path Dijkstra algorithm behavior in an attempt to handle massively scaled out data centers and sneak around IGP flooding scale limitations. I know what you’re thinking:
But BGP-LSVR has the advantage of the underlay and overlay both being BGP, as well as improved convergence times. And possibly dinosaurs wreaking havoc on humanity, but we’ll save that for the sequel.
For more Arrcus goodness, I recommend watching the Network Field Day 21 Arrcus videos, especially the demo presentation below. I’ve also included some handy dandy research links for both Arrcus and BGP-LSVR if you’d like to learn more about either or both!
Link State Vector Routing as the Transport Underlay, by Keyur Patel, Founder & CTO
PacketPushers Blog New Network OS From Startup Arrcus Targets Whitebox Switching And Routing
PacketPushers Priority Queue Episode 160
PacketPushers Heavy Networking Episode 471
Networking Startup Arrcus Raises $30M, Unveils Enhanced OS To Compete With Cisco, Arista
ArcRR™: The Arrcus Route Reflector
Disclaimer: While Networking Field Day, which is sponsored by the companies that present, was very generous to invite me to the fantastic NFD21 event and I am very grateful for it, my opinions are totally my own, as all redheads are far too stubborn to have it any other way.
Published 10/07/2019
Amy Engineer 
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