Connect
The Substrate To Bind Datacenter Switching And Routing
The appliance model, where the hardware and software were tightly controlled by a single vendor, held sway in the datacenter for decades. …
router
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When Diverse Network ASICs Meet A Unifying Operating System
It has been two decades since Juniper Networks, then the big upstart rival to Cisco Systems and others as the dot-com boom was rising towards its crescendo several years hence, took FreeBSD Unix and turned it into a network operating system that spanned both routers and switches. …
Connect
The Switch-Router War Is Over, And Hyperscalers Won
It is hard to say what will happen first: Switching and routing will merge, or an independent networking operating system that can do both will emerge. …
Connect
Relentless Competition Drives Down Ethernet Switch Costs
If you want to see what real competition might look like at some point in the future of the server racket, look no further than the Ethernet switch market, where switch ASICs and the companies that build switches alike have to fight for every dollar and make it up in volume every year without pause. …
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. …
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
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. …
Compute
What Bellwether Cisco Reveals About Datacenter Spending
As the world’s dominant supplier of switches and routers into the datacenter and one of the big providers of servers (with a hope of transforming part of that server businesses into a sizeable hyperconverged storage business), Cisco Systems provides a kind of lens into the glass houses of the world. …
Compute
Enterprises Take A Slight Pause To Process
As the dominant supplier of switches and routers to enterprise and service provider datacenters and as an upstart server maker that has carved out a hefty slice of the systems market in the past seven years, Cisco Systems is a harbinger of what is going on in terms of architectural shifts and spending among the world’s largest companies. …