Networking’s atomic unit: Going small to scale up
The major IT trends are all being driven by what can probably best be summarized as more. Some of the stats are actually fairly eye-popping:
- 40% of the world’s 7 billion people connected in 2014
- 3 devices per person by 2018
- Traffic will triple by 2018
- 100 hours of Youtube video are uploaded every minute
- Datacenter traffic alone will grow with a 25% CAGR
The point is not that things are growing, but that they are growing exceedingly fast. And trends like the Internet of Things and Big Data, along with the continued proliferation of media-heavy communications, are acting as further accelerant.
So how do we scale?
Taking a page out of the storage and compute play books
Storage and compute have gone through architectural changes to alleviate their initial limitations. While networking is not the same as storage or compute, there are interesting lessons to be learned. So what did they do?
The history lesson here is probably largely unnecessary, but the punch lines are fairly meaningful. From a storage perspective, the atomic unit shifted from the spinning disk down to a block. Ultimately, to scale up, what storage did was reduce the size of the useful atomic unit Continue reading