• The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics

  September 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  It is hard to remember that for decades, whether a system was large or small, its storage was intricately and inescapably linked to its compute.

  Network attached storage, as pioneered by NetApp, helped break those links between compute and storage in the enterprise at the file level. But it was the advent of storage area networks that allowed for storage to still be reasonably tightly coupled to servers and work at the lower block level, below file systems, while at the same time allowing that storage to scale independently from the number of disks you might jam into a single …

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• A Rare Peek Inside A 400G Cisco Network Chip

  September 14, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  Server processor architectures are trying to break the ties between memory and compute to allow the capacities of each to scale independently of each other, but switching and routing giant Cisco Systems has already done this for a high-end switch chip that looks remarkably like a CPU tuned for network processing.

  At the recent Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley, Jamie Markevitch, a principal engineer at Cisco showed off the guts of an unnamed but currently shipping network processor, something that happens very rarely in the switching and routing racket. With the exception of the upstarts like Barefoot Networks with …

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• Signposts On The Roadmap Out To 10 Tb/sec Ethernet

  September 8, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  The world of Ethernet switching and routing used to be more predictable than just about any other part of the datacenter, but for the past decade the old adage – ten times the bandwidth for three times the cost – has not held. While 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was launched in 2010 and saw a fair amount of uptake amongst telecom suppliers for their backbones, the hyperscalers decided, quite correctly, that 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was too expensive and opted for 40 Gb/sec instead.

  Now, we are sitting on the cusp of the real 100 Gb/sec Ethernet rollout among hyperscalers and enterprise …

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• Making Mainstream Ethernet Switches More Malleable

  August 4, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  While the hyperscalers of the world are pushing the bandwidth envelope and are rolling out 100 Gb/sec gear in their Ethernet switch fabrics and looking ahead to the not-too-distant future when 200 Gb/sec and even 400 Gb/sec will be available, enterprise customers who make up the majority of switch revenues are still using much slower networks, usually 10 Gb/sec and sometimes even 1 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec seems like a pretty big leap.

  That is why Broadcom, which still has the lion’s share of switch ASIC sales in the datacenter, has revved its long-running Trident family of chips, which lead …

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• Ethernet Getting Back On The Moore’s Law Track

  July 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  It would be ideal if we lived in a universe where it was possible to increase the capacity of compute, storage, and networking at the same pace so as to keep all three elements expanding in balance. The irony is that over the past two decades, when the industry needed for networking to advance the most, Ethernet got a little stuck in the mud.

  But Ethernet has pulls out of its boots and left them in the swamp and is back to being barefoot again on much more solid ground where it can run faster. The move from 10 Gb/sec …

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• Upstart Switch Chip Maker Tears Up The Ethernet Roadmap

  March 21, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  Ethernet switching has its own kinds of Moore’s Law barriers. The transition from 10 Gb/sec to 100 Gb/sec devices over the past decade has been anything but smooth, and a lot of compromises had to be made to even get to the interim – and unusual – 40 Gb/sec stepping stone towards the 100 Gb/sec devices that are ramping today in the datacenter.

  While 10 Gb/sec Ethernet switching is fine for a certain class of enterprise applications that are not bandwidth hungry, for the hyperscalers and cloud builders, 100 Gb/sec is nowhere near enough bandwidth, and 200 Gb/sec, which is …

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• Ranking High Performance Interconnects

  July 14, 2016 Stephen Perrenod

  

  With the increasing adoption of scale-out architectures and cloud computing, high performance interconnect (HPI) technologies have become a more critical part of IT systems. Today, HPI represents its own market segment at the upper echelons of the networking equipment market, supporting applications requiring extremely low latency and exceptionally high bandwidth.

  As big data analytics, machine learning, and business optimization applications become more prevalent, HPI technologies are of increasing importance for enterprises as well. These most demanding enterprise applications, as well as high performance computing (HPC) applications, are generally addressed with scale-out clusters based on large numbers of ‘skinny’ nodes. The …

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• Competition Heats Up In Cluster Interconnects

  July 11, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  Any time a ranking of a technology is put together, that ranking is always called into question as to whether or not it is representative of reality. Rankings, such as the Top 500 list of the top supercomputers in the world, has been the subject of such debate with regards to the Linpack Fortran performance benchmark that is used to create the rankings and its relevance to the performance of actual workloads. When it comes to networking, the changes in the list in recent years are likely a better reflection of what is going on in high performance computing in …

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• Cavium Buys Access To Enterprise With QLogic Deal

  June 17, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  Might doesn’t make right, but it sure does help. One of the recurring bothers about any technology upstart is that they are smaller Davids usually up against vastly larger Goliaths, usually with a broader and deeper set of technologies covering multiple markets. The best way to get traction in one market, then, seems to be to have significant footing in several markets.

  This is the strategy that ARM server chip and switch ASIC maker Cavium is taking as it shells out approximately $1.36 billion to acquire network and storage switch chip maker QLogic. The combination of the two companies will …

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• Next-Gen Network Adapters: More Oomph, Switchless Clusters

  June 15, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  There are two endpoints in any network connection, and you have to focus on both the server adapter and the switch to get the best and most balanced performance out of the network and the proper return on what amounts to be a substantial investment in a cluster.

  With the upcoming ConnectX-5 server adapters, Mellanox Technologies is continuing in its drive to have more and more of the network processing in a server node offloaded to its adapter cards. And it is also rolling out significant new functionality such as background checkpointing and switchless networking, and of course there is …

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