DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH NETWORK PORTS? pic.twitter.com/3mLHRsZzmt
— foone (@Foone) January 3, 2019
This sort of device isn’t generally used for networking as most people would think of it, but is rather intended for testing labs and other venues such as that. For instance, if Google was designing some custom hardware that needed to do some specific network task, they’d plug 200+ of them into this and hammer them with some sort of load tester, reconfigure, then do it again.
The advantage of this device is that it’s possible to change the network configuration without any physical rewiring and it’s completely automatable.
Sure, you could (and some people do) use these for more, but the problem is that it’s expensive and if this one device fails, 288 ports go down at once. So it’s not really for production but makes a great testbed.