As the world’s dominant supplier of switches and routers into the datacenter and one of the big providers of servers (with a hope of transforming part of that server businesses into a sizeable hyperconverged storage business), Cisco Systems provides a kind of lens into the glass houses of the world. …
Getting the ratio of compute to storage right is not something that is easy within a single server design. …
When supercomputer maker SGI tweaked its NUMA server technology to try to pursue sales in the datacenter, the plan was not to go it alone but rather to partner with the makers of workhorse Xeon servers that did not – and would not – make their own big iron but who nonetheless want to sell high-end machines to their customers. …
While legacy monolithic applications will linger in virtual machines for an incredibly long time in the datacenter, new scale-out applications run best on new architectures. …
How much of a premium do you think that networking behemoth Cisco Systems plans to charge for its 25G Ethernet switches compared to their 10G predecessors? …
The convergence of servers and networks forced the hand of networking giant Cisco Systems back in the late 2000s, compelling it to create the Unified Computing System blade servers and their integrated networking and launch them nearly seven years ago now, upsetting the balance of power in the datacenter. …
As the dominant supplier of switches and routers to enterprise and service provider datacenters and as an upstart server maker that has carved out a hefty slice of the systems market in the past seven years, Cisco Systems is a harbinger of what is going on in terms of architectural shifts and spending among the world’s largest companies. …
We have been talking about the impending and now delivered 100 Gb/sec speeds for InfiniBand used by HPC centers and for Ethernet to be used by hyperscalers that it is hard to remember sometimes that the enterprise is a significant laggard when it comes to network bandwidth. …
The way that systems are being built is changing, and the way that the winners and losers are tracked as they peddle their wares into the datacenter has to change to reflect that. …
Sometimes you have to break something to make it work right. …
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