Say what you will about the ruthless dominance of hyperscale companies, but they are managing to propel information technology at a rate, and in ways, that the enterprise and high performance computing markets can only dream of. …
While there are plenty of distributed applications that are going to chew through the hundreds of gigabits per second of bandwidth per port that modern Ethernet or InfiniBand ASICs deliver inside of switches, there are still others that might benefit from having a more streamlined stack that is also more malleable and composable. …
Bringing a new switch ASIC to market is no easy task, and it isn’t cheap, either. …
It has been two decades since Juniper Networks, then the big upstart rival to Cisco Systems and others as the dot-com boom was rising towards its crescendo several years hence, took FreeBSD Unix and turned it into a network operating system that spanned both routers and switches. …
The dividing lines between system buses, system intraconnects, and system interconnects are getting more blurry all the time. …
The speed bumps with switch ASICs are coming fast and furious these days, and the datacenter is no longer dominated by the big switch incumbents such as Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, which made their own chips, switches, and operating systems, and the networking divisions of server OEMs like Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which made some of their own gear – including ASICs – and acquired other companies to help build out their networking businesses – who sometimes also did their own ASICs. …
The apocryphal Chinese curse – “May you live in interesting times” – certainly applies to the datacenter of the early 21st century. …
Ayar Labs looks like it is just about ready to put its optical I/O chiplet technology into commercial datacenter products. …
Even before it launched a $1.3 billion acquisition of Cray back in May, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has had exascale aspirations. …
If you want for the rapid pace of innovation in datacenter networking to continue, then you had better hope that the hyperscalers and major public cloud builders don’t run out of money. …
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