• Making Mainstream Ethernet Switches More Malleable

    August 4, 2017

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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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  • Putting More Brains In The Network Frees Up Compute

    June 8, 2016

    One of the things that high-end network adapter and switch maker Mellanox Technologies got through its $811 million acquisition of network processing chip maker EZchip last September was a team that was well versed in massively parallel processor chip design, and one that could make Mellanox a potential player in the server chip space.

    But not necessarily in the way you might be thinking about it.

    The reason this is the case is that in July 2014, EZchip, wanting to expand out beyond its networking chip business as Applied Micro, Cavium, and Broadcom have all done with ARM-based server chips, …

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  • Construction Zones On The Ethernet Roadmap

    March 24, 2016

    There is never enough bandwidth in a datacenter that is the size of a football field and that is expected to work more or less like a single computer. While 10 Gb/sec Ethernet on the server and 40 Gb/sec Ethernet on the backbone is fine for many enterprises today, hyperscalers, cloud builders, and service providers are pushing up against these limits and crave more bandwidth.

    Getting an entire industry to agree on standards and to produce products that must meet an increasingly diversifying set of needs is a challenge, and the Ethernet Alliance, an industry group that has been working …

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  • The Road To 200G Networks Starts With The Transceiver

    March 22, 2016

    It has been a long time since the dominant architecture in the datacenter has been monolithic systems running siloed applications fed by a three tier network. These days, any organization operating at scale has hundreds to thousands of servers and what used to be an application running on one machine is now distributed across a portion of that iron, chatting back and forth continuously. Networks have gotten flatter and faster because of this shift, and the craving for higher bandwidth and lower latency on network fabrics is accelerating, not abating.

    The ramp for 100 Gb/sec for Ethernet and InfiniBand alike …

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