In the past several decades, data processing and storage systems could be architected from best of breed components, and the market could – and did – sustain multiple suppliers of competing technologies in each of the categories of compute, networking, and storage. …
In one fell swoop, Intel has finally filled a giant hole in its switching product line by acquiring upstart Barefoot Networks, the creator of the P4 programming language for networking devices and the “Tofino” family of Ethernet switch ASICs that make use of it. …
Barefoot Networks is on a mission, and it is a simple one: To give datacenter switches the same kind of openness and programmability that X86 servers have enjoyed for decades in the datacenter. …
When it comes to machine learning training, people tend to focus on the compute. …
If the profit margins are under pressure among the switch and router makers of the world, their chief financial officers can probably place a lot of the blame on Nick McKeown and his several partners throughout the years. …
Breaking into the switch market is not an easy task, whether you are talking about providing whole switches or just the chips that drive them. …
No one knows for sure how pervasive deep learning and artificial intelligence are in the aggregate across all of the datacenters in the world, but what we do know is that the use of these techniques is growing and could represent a big chunk of the processing that gets done every millisecond of every day. …
Open source software has done a lot to transform the IT industry, but perhaps more than anything else it has reminded those who architect complex systems that all elements of a datacenter have to be equally open and programmable for them to make the customizations that are necessary to run specific workloads efficiently and therefore cost effectively. …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform