It is funny to think of the modern datacenter as an appliance, like an iPhone, but in the cases of the hyperscalers and the very largest public cloud builders, this is more or less what they are building. …
A system is more than its central processor, and perhaps at no time in history has this ever been true than right now. …
With the dividing line between switching and routing blurring among the hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is no wonder to us that switching is growing as Ethernet switch ASICs get more and more routing functions and true Ethernet routing has remained more or less flat in the past five years. …
If hyperscalers, cloud builders, HPC centers, enterprises, and both OEMs and ODMs like one thing, it is a steady drumbeat of technology enhancements to drive their datacenters forward. …
As GPU-accelerated servers go, Nvidia’s DGX-2 box is hard to beat. …
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. …
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