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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. …
switch
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Switch Silicon To Relieve Choke Points In Servers
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. …
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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. …
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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. …
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Bringing Big Bandwidth To Large Enterprises
Hyperscalers change their datacenters – by which we mean whole generations of servers, storage, and switching – like regular enterprises upgrade server platforms. …
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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. …
Compute
The Slow But Inevitable Shift To Cloudy Infrastructure
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. …
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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
Prying The Lid Off Black Box Switch SDKs
It would be hard to find a business that has been more proprietary, insular, and secretive than the networking industry, and for good reasons. …