Facebook and its peers in the hyperscale sector have been pushing the very closed network switch business to open up and embrace hardware designs that look more like X86 servers and that are based on a Linux operating system. …
Sometimes a microserver is just a little too micro to do the job, something that a lot of skeptics have been saying about so-called “wimpy core” machines since the idea took off about five years ago. …
It is no accident that virtualizing the network has taken longer than virtualizing servers or storage, and it is similarly not a coincidence that the hyperscale datacenter operators and a small number of very large businesses have decided to build their own switches and routers operating systems for these devices. …
The so-called industry standard server, by which most people mean a machine based on an X86 processor and generally one made by Intel, has utterly transformed the datacenter. …
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