Fulcrum Microsystems Blog

Andy Bechtolsheim has begun blogging at Arista. His first entry, titled “The Silicon Choice for Cloud Networking”, is a thought-provoking perspective on the maturity of merchant switch silicon and the impact that is having on the economics of next-generation networks.  Andy notes:

In my own career, I have led the development of several generations of very successful network switch silicon. However, even I could not design better silicon switch chips than what is available now on the merchant market. To me this is an inflection point for the industry that is not unlike what happened in the computer industry with the adoption of industry standard architectures. While the details are different, the underlying economics are the same. And what we have learned from the history of silicon technology is that, over the long term, economics always wins.

Read Andy’s blog…

If you’ve ever stopped by Fulcrum’s booth at a tradeshow, you’re likely familiar with our popular t-shirts.  While each year we mix in a different graphic, the theme is the same — adopt Ethernet or die.  This week in The Register, Chris Mellor introduces a new metaphor for the power of Ethernet — the meatgrinder.  And, while he may have stolen our idea for a future t-shirt concept, his perspectives on how traditional InfiniBand companies like Voltaire recognize the need to embrace fabric convergence are insightful — and perhaps foresightful as well.  Read the article…

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The Register took an entertaining stroll down Ethernet’s memory lane, through the eyes of Bob Metcalfe.  If you’re into networking and technology nostalgia, you’ll enjoy this retrospective.  Read the article…

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Woven’s Joseph Ammarito outlines the key networking requirements for high-end data modeling employed for oil exploration and seismic analysis, in an HPCWire article.  Key requirements include: non-blocking, full-bandwidth fabrics; lossless packet delivery; ultra-low latency; and Clos architectures for scalability.  Read the article…

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There has been a lot of press recently about unified Data Center fabrics. But as a recent article in the IEEE Spectrum Magazine shows, these fabrics may need to support up to a million servers. To make this possible, the fabric silicon components must be highly integrated to minimize cost, power and area. Although more complex switch platforms utilizing chip-sets will find uses at the edge of the Data Center network, most of the network will employ lower cost switch-on-a-chip solutions that can scale to support thousands of nodes with minimal latency. This is why companies like Google and Microsoft may start to look at efficient solutions from the likes of Arista, BLADE and Woven.

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The battle for the data center is well underway and there’s plenty of speculation on potential mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships.  Roger Cheng of Dow Jones Newswire has a comprehensive perspective on the subject.  It’ll be interesting to see how his speculation plays out.  Read the article…

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Chris Preimesberger, in an eWeek article, checks in with stakeholders around the table regarding Cisco’s move into blade computing. Big surprise, beta customers are generally positive. Everyone else? Not so much. Vikram Mehta (CEO of BLADE Network Technologies) points out:

“so-called unified computing strategy holds vast and arguably adverse implications as a way to lock customers into a proprietary world while locking out vendors like HP and IBM that are trusted open systems suppliers to enterprises around the world.”

Read the article…

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A new Lippis Report (#121) outlines how the network in the cloud is becoming a two-tier infrastructure, with low latency, virtualization, and non-blocking throughput being the key pillars of the architecture — and, of course, Arista being a key thought leader and solutions provider.  Read the report…

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Good news.  Intel’s Jason Waxman (GM of High-Density Computing) told The Register, in a recent interview, that 2009 is the year of 10Gb Ethernet.  Dense and low-cost top-of-rack switches from Arista and BLADE, new high-performance processors, and LAN-on-motherboard are the key enablers.  10GbE is ready for take-off.  Read the article…

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