• Flattening Networks – And Budgets – With 400G Ethernet

    January 20, 2018

    If it were not for the insatiable bandwidth needs of the twenty major hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is safe to say that the innovation necessary to get Ethernet switching and routing up to 200 Gb/sec or 400 Gb/sec might not have been done at the fast pace that the industry as been able to pull off.

    Knowing that there are 100 million ports of switching up for grabs among these companies from 2017 through 2021 – worth tens of billions of dollars per year in revenues – is a strong motivator to get clever.

    And that is precisely what …

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  • Arista Gives Tomahawk 25G Ethernet Some XPliant Competition

    December 13, 2016

    Processing for server compute has gotten more general purpose for the past two decades and is seeing resurgence in built-for-purpose chips. Network equipment makers have made their own specialized chips as well as buying merchant chips of varying kinds to meet very specific switching and routing needs.

    Of the chip upstarts that are competing against industry juggernaut Cisco Systems, Arista Networks stands out as the company that decided from its founding in 2009 to rely only on merchant silicon for switches and to differentiate on speed to market and software functionality and commonality across many different switch ASICs with its …

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  • Buffers Sometimes Beat Bandwidth For Networks

    December 8, 2016

    Just like every kind of compute job cannot be handled by a single type of microprocessor, the diversity of networking tasks in the datacenters of the world require a variety of different switch and router ASICs to best manage those tasks.

    As the volume leader in the switching arena, Broadcom comes under intense competitive pressure and has to keep on its toes to provide enough variety in its switch chips to keep its rivals at bay. One way that Broadcom does this is by having two distinct switch ASIC lines.

    The StrataXGS line of chips have the famous and ubiquitous …

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  • Broadcom Strikes 100G Ethernet Harder With Tomahawk-2

    October 31, 2016

    Because space costs so much money and having multiple machines adds complexity and even more costs on top of that, there is always pressure to increase the density of the devices that provide compute, storage, and networking capacity in the datacenter. Moore’s Law, in essence, doesn’t just drive chips, but also the devices that are comprised of chips.

    Often, it is the second or third iteration of a technology that takes off because the economics and density of the initial products can’t match the space and power constraints of a system rack. Such was the case with the initial 100 …

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  • Homegrown 25G Chips Help Cisco Hold The Switch Line

    March 1, 2016

    How much of a premium do you think that networking behemoth Cisco Systems plans to charge for its 25G Ethernet switches compared to their 10G predecessors? How does zero grab you? Or even less than zero?

    That’s the plan, and this is surprising but competition will do that. Considering the profit margins that Cisco shoots for and has historically attained, you might be thinking that the company would be willing to walk away from deals, or at the very least switch to merchant silicon and get into a price war with its growing ranks of rivals in datacenter switching to …

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  • Facebook Busts Out Of Homegrown Switches

    December 2, 2015

    There is a misconception out there that the hyperscalers of the world are so rich that they always have the shiniest new toys in their datacenters. This is not correct. Hyperscalers are restrained by the same laws of physics and the same rules of accounting and budgeting as the rest of the IT sector.

    That said, they do push up against boundaries earlier, and how they react to those boundaries is inherently interesting because these large organizations are a kind of leading indicator for directions in which large enterprises might eventually head when they hit a wall or a ceiling …

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  • Dell Goes Modular With Tomahawk 25G Switches

    September 24, 2015

    The “Tomahawk” switch chips from Broadcom, which are based on the new 25G Ethernet standard crafted by hyperscalers, are starting to appear in more and more devices. This week, it is Dell’s turn to roll out some iron.

    Back in April, Dell was the first vendor out the door with switches based on the Tomahawk chips, which support port speeds of 25 Gb/sec, 50 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec (with one, two, or four lanes per port) and which also can be downshifted to run at 10 Gb/sec or 40 Gb/sec speeds to be compatible with Ethernet server adapter cards and …

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  • Arista Wields Tomahawks In 25G Ethernet Price War

    September 14, 2015

    It looks like networking price war is getting set to break out in the largest datacenters of the world, and this is precisely what Google and Microsoft had in mind when they formed the 25G Ethernet consortium back in July 2014.

    Unhappy with the bandwidth, cost per bit, and high power consumption and heat dissipation of existing 40 Gb/sec and 100 Gb/sec switches, the two companies teamed up with switch chip makers Broadcom and Mellanox Technologies and switch maker Arista Networks to create a new standard that would offer 25 Gb/sec and 50 Gb/sec switching inside racks and feeding up …

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