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. …
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. …
If there is a recession underway – and we are not convinced that there is even a little bit – then the Ethernet switch market did not get the memo. …
It is tough to get excited about mature markets that grow at a steady rate unless it happens to be the most profitable part of the market. …
It is perplexing to us that the world’s largest distributor of client and server operating systems and also the creator of the Linux-based, open source SONiC network operating system – that would be Microsoft with its Windows and Windows Server franchises – did not see the benefit or the need to commercialize SONiC and lead the open networking revolution. …
The hunger for more compute and storage capacity and for more bandwidth to shuffle and shuttle ever-increasing amounts of data is not insatiable among the hyperscalers and large cloud builders of the world. …
A lot of compute is moving to the edge, and that means that networking and storage has to follow it. …
There are times when Cisco Systems, which has a strong presence in datacenter switching, routing, and serving as well as a representative showing in storage and software, is a bellwether for IT market spending and transitions going on in the IT space. …
It may have taken a while for the transition to 200 Gb/sec and 400 Gb/sec networking to take off in the datacenter, but this higher gear to switching is finally kicking in and delivering unprecedented bang for the buck in networks, and in fairly short order at least compared to sluggish pace that 100 Gb/sec Ethernet took getting into the datacenter. …
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