Question
You have heard the term "white box computer." What is it?
Answer
A workstation or server that is not created by a well-recognized brand. Some people refer to plain flavors as "vanilla." If a data center is getting white-box servers, they are not getting Dell or HP servers. White-box servers are affordable and may compete with the public cloud. Commodity servers are well known for being acceptable for Hadoop.
See these sources for more information about white-box computers:
- https://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/definition/white-box-server
- https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/whitebox.htm
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_box_(computer_hardware
It is important to note that white box computers may have a bright future: "White boxes have shown they can hold their own in software-defined networking (SDN) deployments and supporting industry standards." (This quote was taken from Networkworld.com
White box computers should not be confused with white box testing. White box testing is also referred to as clear box testing (according to guru99.com). This testing involves seeing variables and the stages of transformation of the data -- as opposed to just looking at the output (as in blackbox testing where the process itself is not analyzed). White box testing is more complex than black box testing.