Tipping Point 2.0
Nine months ago, I wrote about how advances in silicon designs and technologies were going to create a product set that will democratize the networking components in modern data centers. Specifically, that the Trident II family of products will perform the role that Xeon did on the compute side and provide the fulcrum on which open networking OSes would flip the industry.
Today, I am happy to add to that story and talk a little about the secondary effects that that tipping point has set in motion. We had set about to make the networking space an open, agile and innovation-laden environment akin to the compute space, but we are finding a tremendous appetite for the story to be moved further forward and have networking and compute be treated as complete equals. The drive to manage compute and networking in a harmonious way, in the way that a bus and CPUs operate inside a single box, will have a familiar lynchpin – x86 processors.
Let’s look at a little historical context around the progression of CPUs that sit inside data center switching systems. Traditionally, the CPU that sat inside a networking box operated its control plane. The calculus used to Continue reading
