Freescale preps white box switch for Interop launch

Freescale has looked at the software-defined network market and decided it likes what it sees: the company is launching into the white box market in partnership with Advantech.

The coming network services switch, to be detailed at next week's Interop show in Las Vegas, will use Freescale's QorIQ T4240 silicon the company says.

The 24-core “server-class” processor will be paired with ASICs to handle switching. The combo will give the coming white box a Linux operating system, OpenStack and OpenFlow support, and an API for OpenDaylight data path control, support for vitual network functions, and Layer 2 and 3 forwarding.

Freescale's VortiQa SDN software will be included, providing OpenFlow 1.3 support for protocols at Layer 4 and above.

SDX Central says the switching ASIC will be Broadcom's Trident II.

Security is taken care of with integrated support for firewalls, intrusion detection, and IPsec over VxLAN. There's also support for policy-based routing and IPsec VPNs, and L2/3 Ethernet switching.

Freescale hopes to attract interest from network operators, the company told SDX Central, since they're the kinds of services that suit being hosted close to the switch.

The switch will use Broadcom's OpenFlow Data Plane Abstraction API, but with Freescale's own smarts making sure that all OpenFlow 1.3 for Open vSwitch features are programmable. ®