The consensus is growing among the big datacenter operators of the world that CPU cores are such a precious commodity that they should never do network, storage, or hypervisor housekeeping work but rather focus on the core computation that they are really acquired to do. …
Stanford University doesn’t own software defined networking. But it sure does feel that way some days. …
In the past five years or so, we have had a remarkably good – and predictable – run of increases in aggregate switching bandwidth out of the major ASIC suppliers, and it has been a boon that underpins the massive expansion in datacenters among the hyperscalers. …
The appliance model, where the hardware and software were tightly controlled by a single vendor, held sway in the datacenter for decades. …
Moore’s Law might be slowing down CPU compute capacity increases in recent years, but the innovation has been coming at a steady drumbeat for the interconnects used inside servers and between nodes in distributed computing systems. …
Most people in the IT community tend to their fields, making their living in their patches, but there are some who change the landscape, and still fewer who do it again and again. …
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. …
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