Say what you will about the ruthless dominance of hyperscale companies, but they are managing to propel information technology at a rate, and in ways, that the enterprise and high performance computing markets can only dream of. …
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. …
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. …
Hyperscalers change their datacenters – by which we mean whole generations of servers, storage, and switching – like regular enterprises upgrade server platforms. …
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. …
Architectural transitions for layers in the IT stack at hyperscalers can happen in a matter of years, and cloud builders and HPC centers can move at almost the same speed. …
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. …
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. …
It would be hard to find a business that has been more proprietary, insular, and secretive than the networking industry, and for good reasons. …
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. …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform