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. …
switch
Connect
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. …
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. …
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. …
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
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. …
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. …