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The Substrate To Bind Datacenter Switching And Routing
The appliance model, where the hardware and software were tightly controlled by a single vendor, held sway in the datacenter for decades. …
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PCI-Express Steps Up To The Bandwidth Challenge
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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Point To Point In The Datacenter With Andy Bechtolsheim
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. …
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Switch Silicon To Relieve Choke Points In Servers
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. …
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A New Twist On PCI-Express Switching For The Datacenter
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. …
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Innovium Boosts Switch Chip Performance Without A Process Shrink
Bringing a new switch ASIC to market is no easy task, and it isn’t cheap, either. …
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When Diverse Network ASICs Meet A Unifying Operating System
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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Eating The Interconnect Alphabet Soup With Intel’s CXL
The dividing lines between system buses, system intraconnects, and system interconnects are getting more blurry all the time. …
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Everyone Will Want Higher Bandwidth And More Ports – Eventually
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. …
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Networking Needs More Than Incremental Innovation
The apocryphal Chinese curse – “May you live in interesting times” – certainly applies to the datacenter of the early 21st century. …