I wonder this will actually start making networking equipment <i>cheaper</i>.<p>I guess 6 years ago or so I bought a "small business" Netgear 8 port gigabit switch, for around £100.<p>That same switch with minor hardware revisions was about £60 when i last checked. Ridiculous when you think how much other areas have advanced in that time.<p>Of course it runs some crappy Netgear firmware that they stopped updating 4 years ago.<p>I hope this standardized switching hardware ends up in smaller boxes (8-12 port), that i can run a decent open switch OS on.
It's interesting to see this alongside the efforts by traditional vendors to further integrate servers and networking. Cisco AFAIK has been pretty successful getting people to buy into the UCS idea.