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HP On Right Track With Two Network OSes: Page 2 of 3

In a recent blog post, ProVision Inside, some more more insight was offered on what drives this:

So what do we think we can bring to this market that makes us want to go through the pain and cost of doing our own ASICs? A lower cost switch family with functionality and flexibility that targets this specific market space.

The engineering control we have with ProVision allows us to make carefully balanced engineering decisions concerning features and on-chip resources. The features are right-sized and focused. For example, routing tables are sized to be reasonable but not too large. Resources usually found outside of the switch ASIC, such as the module CPU itself, and packet and ACL (TCAM) memory, are appropriately sized, based on our knowledge of our customer needs, and integrated onto the ASIC. It also gives us ASICs that supports true chassis products, with the high performance and modular connection flexibility that that brings, for the edge. You won't find chassis in this space in other vendor product lines.

And in the comments, Dan Montesanto, switch product manager for the Networking Unit, says:

In a nutshell, we think custom ASICs make a lot of sense in the 'middle of the market'. On the low-end, where features don't matter, nearly all the vendors use merchant ASICs. Likewise, in the high-end all the investment/value is in software--so vendors gladly use merchant ASICs so they can focus on switch firmware. Given that the A12500/A9500/A7500 products have been mostly designed to tackle data center and large enterprise campus LAN core deployments--where the longest datasheet feature list wins--I think it makes sense that those platforms are built using merchant ASICs, leaving the vendors to focus precious R&D on software.

In the middle--mid-size businesses or at the edge of large enterprise campus LAN environments-- customers need more than what low-end products can provide but don't want the complexity or cost that would come with products using full-featured ASICs really built for those feature-driven deployments.

In 2000 HP first recognized that there was an opportunity to built custom ASICs to enable us to build products that could strike this middle-ground feature-value balance. The result: simplified/lower cost hardware (through integration driving the need for fewer components), hardware flexibility (ASIC-level feature programmability) and ASIC-integrated security (ASIC-level DoS protection, memory error detection). Customers got products with balanced feature sets and a fair bit of investment protection at attractive price points.