No matter if you are talking about compute or networking, there are two opposing forces that are constantly at interplay on a field of green money. … Why There’s Hard, Cold Cash For Soft, Disaggregated Routing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Why There’s Hard, Cold Cash For Soft, Disaggregated Routing — The Next Platform
I love reading online articles like this from The Next Platform, and others like EETimes because they fulfil a gap I have in technology reporting that used fill by reading Byte.com. If you want to know what the hyperscale data center type architects, designers are using, the products they select, or the competitors in that rather elite, Formula 1 racing type arena, Next Platform is the only way to go. I first learned about Software Defined Networking about two years ago, when I had to read-up on it for part of a job interview. It’s interesting for people managing some “small” scale racks of servers. But it’s overkill really. The true pay-off is for the large, hyperscale, ultra-dense, ultra-consolidated folks who might have need for optimization, reconfiguration, fail-over, clustering, backup on global scales. Moving workloads, and “zones” around as cycles free up, or weather conditions (meaning cooler temps) make themselves available and the cost per bit comes down. Add things like containerized apps at scale, and the question is, how do you migrate that network infrastructure to something way more horizontal and way less vertical (I remember back to reading about those giant, multi-rack core routers everyone lauded back in 2000-2001 time period). Having a so-called “disaggregated” switch and routing architecture sounds like you have just enough smarts to use a tool set without re-inventing the wheel. And the tool sets are there. DriveNets sounds like a very interesting company and product, and we’ll see how much that disrupts the legacy players in the router/switch market for the Datacenter/Hyperscale market.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 