For the past decade or so, we have been convinced by quite a large number of IT suppliers that security functions, network and storage virtualization functions, and even the server virtualization hypervisor for carving up compute itself should be offloaded from servers to intermediaries somewhat illogically called data processing units, or DPUs. …
There are a lot of things going on in the datacenter and campus interconnect markets, but one of the weirder things we observe from the most recent market data coming out of IDC about the Ethernet portion of this market is that it is like a country music record being played backwards. …
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. …
If the datacenter is the computer – and it certainly is for hundreds of companies comprising somewhere well north of half of server sales worldwide – then the Ethernet fabric, consisting of switches and routers, is the backplane of that computer. …
It is no surprise at all that Nvidia’s datacenter business is making money hang over fist right now as generative AI makes machine learning a household word and is giving us something akin to a Dot Com Boom in the glass houses of the world. …
For Arista Networks, the poster-child of hyperscaler and cloud build networking that, more than any other vendor, has championed merchant silicon and Linux as the basis of a modular network operating system, 2022 was a bumper crop year. …
Variety is not only the spice of life, it is also the way to drive innovation and to mitigate risk. …
With each passing year, the phrase “The network is the computer,” coined in 1984 by John Gage, director of research and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, becomes more and more true. …
Here is an old saw that we bring out of the toolbox every now and then, and we use it just enough so it has never really gotten rusty and it can cut through a lot of crap to make a point: The datacenter, and perhaps all clients, would have been better off if InfiniBand had just become the ubiquitous I/O switched fabric standard it was designed to be back in the late 1990s. …
The hyperscalers and cloud builders are the toughest customers in the IT sector, demanding the highest performance at the lowest price and an ever-improving ratio between the two. …
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