• Taking The Long View On High Performance Networking

    April 20, 2018

    It is hard to make a profit selling hardware to supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders, all of whom demand the highest performance at the lowest prices. But in the first quarter of this year, network chip, adapter, switch, and cable supplier Mellanox Technologies – which has products aimed at all three of these segments – managed to do it.

    And with activist investor, Starboard Value, pressing Mellanox to make the kinds of profits that other networking companies command, the swing to a very decent net income could not have come at a better time. Starboard has been on the …

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  • VMware’s Platform Can Only Reflect The Enterprise Datacenter

    April 18, 2018

    When a company has 500,000 enterprise customers that are paying for perpetual licenses and support on systems software – this is an absolutely enormous base by corporate standards, and a retro licensing model straight from the 1980s and 1990s – what does it do for an encore?

    That’s a very good question, and for now the answer for VMware seems to be to sell virtual storage and virtual networking networking to that vast base of virtual compute customers, and take wheelbarrows full of money to the bank on behalf of parent Dell Technologies. Virtualization took root during the Great Recession …

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  • The Battle Of The InfiniBands, Part Two

    April 13, 2018

    For decades, the IT market has been obsessed with the competition between suppliers of processors, but there are rivalries between the makers of networking chips and the full-blown switches that are based on them that are just as intense. Such a rivalry exists between the InfiniBand chips from Mellanox Technologies and the Omni-Path chips from Intel, which are based on technologies Intel got six years ago when it acquired the InfiniBand business from QLogic for $125 million.

    At the time, we quipped that AMD needed to buy Mellanox, but instead AMD turned right around and shelled out $334 million to …

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  • Inside Nvidia’s NVSwitch GPU Interconnect

    April 4, 2018

    At the GPU Technology Conference last week, we told you all about the new NVSwitch memory fabric interconnect that Nvidia has created to link multiple “Volta” GPUs together and that is at the heart of the DGX-2 system that the company has created to demonstrate its capabilities and to use on its internal Saturn V supercomputer at some point in the future.

    Since the initial announcements, more details have been revealed by Nvidia about NVSwitch, including details of the chip itself and how it helps applications wring a lot more performance from the GPU accelerators.

    Our first observation upon looking …

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  • Aruba Networks Leads HPE to the Edge

    March 29, 2018 Jeffrey Burt

    When pre-split Hewlett-Packard bought Aruba Networks three years ago for $3 billion, the goal was to create a stronger and larger networking business that combined both wired and wireless networking capabilities and could challenge market leader Cisco Systems at a time when enterprises were more fully embracing mobile computing and public clouds.

    Aruba was launched in 2002 and by the time of the acquisition had established itself as a leading vendor in the wireless networking market and had an enthusiastic following of users who call themselves “Airheads.” The worry among many of them was that once the deal was closed, …

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  • Dell EMC Puts Open Networking on the Edge

    March 21, 2018

    Computing resources – including storage and networking – are continuing their march toward the network edge, drawn like a magnet to the rapidly proliferating connected devices in the world and the huge amounts of data that they’re generating that need to be collected, processed and analyzed.

    As we’ve talked about here at The Next Platform over the past few months, the distributed nature of computing, fueled by such drivers as the cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT) and greater mobility, and the demand for capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and analytics to manage the data call for moving …

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  • FPGA Interconnect Boosted In Concert With Compute

    March 12, 2018

    To keep their niche in computing, field programmable gate arrays not only need to stay on the cutting edge of chip manufacturing processes. They also have to include the most advanced networking to balance out that compute, rivalling that which the makers of switch ASICs provide in their chips.

    By comparison, CPUs have it easy. They don’t have the serializer/deserializer (SerDes) circuits that switch chips have as the foundation of their switch fabric. Rather, they might have a couple of integrated Ethernet network interface controllers embedded on the die, maybe running at 1 Gb/sec or 10 Gb/sec, and they offload …

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  • Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends

    March 9, 2018

    Of the three pillars of the datacenter – compute, storage, and networking – the one that consistently still has some margins and yet does not dominate the overall system budget is networking. While these elements affect each other, they are still largely standalone realms, with their own specialized devices and suppliers. And so it is important to know the trends in the technologies.

    Until fairly recently, the box counters like IDC and Gartner have been pretty secretive about the data they have about the networking business. But IDC has been gradually giving a little more flavor than just saying Cisco …

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  • The New HPE Sheriff Lays Down The Hybrid IT Law

    February 27, 2018

    There is a new sheriff in town at Hewlett Packard Enterprise – that would be chief executive officer Antonio Neri – and that means a new way of looking at the books and therefore steering the business. No, we didn’t mean that the other way around.

    In opening up its books for the first quarter of its fiscal 2018 year, which ended in January, we can see some important things about HPE’s business, and at the same time, we have lost some visibility about core parts of its business.

    First of all, the books have been reclassified significantly in the …

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  • Programmable Networks Train Neural Nets Faster

    February 14, 2018

    When it comes to machine learning training, people tend to focus on the compute. We always want to know if the training is being done on specialized parallel X86 devices, like Intel’s Xeon Phi, or on massively parallel GPU devices, like Nvidia’s “Pascal” and “Volta” accelerators, or even on custom devices from the likes of Nervana Systems (now part of Intel), Wave Systems, Graphcore, Google, or Fujitsu.

    But as is the case with other kinds of high performance computing, the network matters when it comes to machine learning, and it can be the differentiating …

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