As major players in white-box networking, Edge-Core and Cumulus Linux pose an existential threat to incumbent vendors of data center network hardware. The appeal is simple: Run open-source code on commodity hardware, and manage everything as you already do with your servers. It's the same formula that defeated proprietary server vendors years ago, and there are reasons to believe that, at least in the data center, white-box will again triumph, this time over proprietary networking vendors.

As major players in white-box networking, Edge-Core and Cumulus Linux pose an existential threat to incumbent vendors of data center network hardware. The appeal is simple: Run open-source code on commodity hardware, and manage everything as you already do with your servers. It's the same formula that defeated proprietary server vendors years ago, and there are reasons to believe that, at least in the data center, white-box will again triumph, this time over proprietary networking vendors.