Connect
The Old Switcheroo
The cost of servers keeps going up and up, thanks in large part to memory, flash, and GPU prices rising as too much demand chases too little supply and also due in part to the rising cost of processors. …
Ethernet
Cloud
Feeding The Insatiable Bandwidth Beast
Breaking into any part of the IT stack against incumbents with vast installed bases is not easy task. …
Cloud
Taking The Long View On High Performance Networking
It is hard to make a profit selling hardware to supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders, all of whom demand the highest performance at the lowest prices. …
Uncategorized
In Modern Datacenters, The Latency Tail Wags The Network Dog
The expression, the tail wags the dog, is used when a seemingly unimportant factor or infrequent event actually dominates the situation. …
Cloud
Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends
Of the three pillars of the datacenter – compute, storage, and networking – the one that consistently still has some margins and yet does not dominate the overall system budget is networking. …
Cloud
The Road To 400G Ethernet Is Paved With Bechtolsheim’s Intentions
The best way to make a wave is to make a big splash, which is something that Andy Bechtolsheim, perhaps the most famous serial entrepreneur in IT infrastructure, is very good at doing. …
AI
Flattening Networks – And Budgets – With 400G Ethernet
If it were not for the insatiable bandwidth needs of the twenty major hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is safe to say that the innovation necessary to get Ethernet switching and routing up to 200 Gb/sec or 400 Gb/sec might not have been done at the fast pace that the industry as been able to pull off. …
Cloud
The Tug Of War Between InfiniBand And Ethernet
If you want to get a microcosmic view of the epic battle between Ethernet and InfiniBand (which also includes Omni-Path no matter how much Intel protests) as they relate to high performance computing in its many modern guises, there is perhaps no better place to look at what Mellanox Technologies is selling. …
Connect
The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics
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. …
Cloud
A Rare Peek Inside A 400G Cisco Network Chip
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. …