Inside a 32x100GbE Switch and its Big Flaw

We check out the Celestica Seastone DX010 32x 100GbE switch and look at the different components inside and out. This is a popular switch platform for learning SONiC open networking. It is based on the Broadcom BCM56960 / StrataXGS / Tomahawk platform which means it has a lot of great L3 features. We then discuss the potentially major flaw that can brick this switch and many like it.

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[bushhawk]

I though: "Hey, that's a neat price" until I realised that you are going to spend at least twice that ammount on transcievers to populate the ports.

[bork]

I got one of these and minecraft is smoother than ever

[TheBackyardChemist]

If you are handy with a soldering iron, and you can find the correct pin/trace adding the resistor mod should be possible.

[wildmanjeff]

Thanks for the video Patrick, Love STH channel and content. Learned a lot from your channel :)

[jozefaz]

We got hit by the intel chip bug and had to RMA over 2000 Cisco 4K routers. What a nightmare that was.

[critical]

Man I'm just happy with my cheap gigabit netgear switch lmao

[excitedbox]

Is that the bug where the Internal clock dies? You only need to add a new resistor/solder to another resistor. Dave from EEVblog had a NAS with that CPU and he shows how to fix it.

[henrik]

2020: 2.5 Gbit becoming more common in retail computer motherboards
2016:.... 🤔

[KrisLipscombe]

I really like that placing on the power supplies, that’s just a nice feature and shows a bit of thought. Completely agree that you’d expect some better user servicing access at this price, particularly when this kind of switch is going to be key infrastructure

[ion]

Nice teardown guys. If feasible it would've been interesting to see the underside and board-board interconnect for the switching PCB. Guessing it's regular PCIe between the BCM ASIC and x86 CPU?

[michaltatka]

Thank you for the review - I bought two, shortly I will test it (and SONiC sound interesting too). Time to strengthen the team Cisco 3064PQ (48x10GbE+4*40GbE) and 3164Q (64x40GbE), used for LAN.

[PrestonBannister]

Interesting, as I really do not have a handle on the white-box network gear market. My use case is a high-end special-purpose gadget that moves a lot data. Kind'a sort'a looks like a datacenter in a box. (What I would *really* like to find is an *unmanaged* 25GbE switch, oddly.)

[nateb]

How interesting! This is way outside my wheelhouse these days, but I used to play with big SONET gear, and lately I'm doing a lot more hardware hacking. While this had some gorgeous views, it left me hungry for more detail! I'd love to see more perspectives from different disciplines in here, especially a more detailed look at the board-stack connectors, all those debug headers all over, and the various silicon aside from the Broadcom piece de resistance. Also, how does that heatsink work being so wide; is there an integrated heatpipe or something? This hunk of hardware has more stories to tell!

[JuMPeRaBG]

You got that switch for a $1000? This is insane!!!

[zippeveryone]

Man, this is cool! The bug isn't but the hardware is really really cool! I love the look of hardware and knowing what this is capable of just makes it so much more interesting!

Thank you for the rare insight into this piece of DC hardware! <3

[zactodd]

Point of interest. Is the c2000 resistor fix something that could be done to a switch like this. Have carried it out on a synology unit myself and Patrick did mention the fix, but sounded like it was implemented at the manufacturer level.

[steven]

The bright yellow battery holder is likely because they were cheaper than a black one, in a product like this where it's unlikely any customer is going to open the product it makes sense to just go with the weird colour part to save a bit on BOM cost as nobody buying them will care what colour it is.

[paulstubbs]

Interesting, the bit about switch efficiency & cost per gigabit. Around here I am still mainly on a 100mb switch, it uses way less power and my internet connection cannot saturate it.
If I am mucking about, and want to move a ton of data, I can easily patch in something a lot faster, however as a daily driver, watching ServeTheHome video's etc., the old Alloy 100mb is it.

[thatLion]

I'm surprised this 100gb switch is already 4 years old. I never actually seen 100gb used at any of the dc I sit. I did a few 25/40gbe upgrades that cost a fortune

[thibaultmol]

That thing looks so similar to the dell switch that Linus looked at recently. So does dell use this company oem as well?