The rise of the merchant silicon suppliers for datacenter networking and routing, which was spearheaded by Broadcom with chips and Arista Networks with switches, was not a foregone conclusion. …
Our choice of words in founding this publication nearly a decade ago were no accident. …
Here we go again. Some big hyperscalers and cloud builders and their ASIC and switch suppliers are unhappy about Ethernet, and rather than wait for the IEEE to address issues, they are taking matters in their own hands to create what will ultimately become an IEEE standard that moves Ethernet forward in a direction and speed of their choosing. …
It was a fortuitous coincidence that Nvidia was already working on massively parallel GPU compute engines for doing calculations in HPC simulations and models when the machine learning tipping point happened, and similarly, it was fortunate for InfiniBand that it had the advantage of high bandwidth, low latency, and remote direct memory access across GPUs at that same moment. …
Variety is not only the spice of life, it is also the way to drive innovation and to mitigate risk. …
A lot of compute is moving to the edge, and that means that networking and storage has to follow it. …
If there is anything that hyperscalers and cloud builders value more than anything else, it is regularity and predictability. …
Once Dell spun out VMware on Wall Street, it was only a matter of time before someone would put together enough money to acquire it. …
Amazon Web Services, the juggernaut of cloud computing, may be forging its own path with Arm-based CPUs and associated DPUs thanks to its 2015 acquisition of Annapurna Labs for $350 million. …
Cisco Systems may still be the biggest supplier of switches and routers in general, but it has long since been surpassed by Broadcom when it comes to suppling the silicon that does the switching itself and sometimes even a little bit of routing in the datacenter in particular. …
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