What's this under the Christmas tree? A gift-wrapped Mellanox, for Microsoft? Say it ain't so

Microsoft is considering buying Mellanox, according to a report on Wednesday by an Israeli financial newspaper. The American tech giant has hired Goldman Sachs, while the Ethernet and InfiniBand networking gear maker, based in Yokneam Illit, Israel, has tapped J.P. Morgan, to oversee the acquisition negotiations. That's …

[Pascal Monett]

"Starboard Value has been screaming [..] to do something to boost its financial performance

So, doesn't care a whit about what the company is actually trying to do, it just WANTS MORE MONEY NOW !!

It's so nice when shareholders invest in a company instead of betting on it.

[AMBxx]

Re: "Starboard Value has been screaming [..] to do something to boost its financial performance

Don't worry. At least they now have the certainty that Microsoft will screw up then shut down.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thus, it's likely Redmond wants this network specialist to design some custom parts for its server racks,

What makes you think it does not do that already? The supported switches list in the SONiC source is an interesting read - you will not find some of them on the open market

[abufrejoval]

Need a new type of anti-trust

Of course, Microsoft won't dominate the network market after that acquisition. But as a web-hoster you can now much to easily find yourself in a position, where your ability to compete with Azure is impaired by using Mellanonx switches and NICs.

I don't like this one bit better than Bigfoot being bought by Amazon, Google or Facebook (nor RedHat by IBM for that matter).

[Acer711]

Re: Need a new type of anti-trust

It's interesting that you mention this. Amazon and Google for the most part in this space, build their own switch and NIC's. Microsoft may be headed that direction by buying(Mellanox) and making that technology proprietary. Perhaps the renewed interest in Facebook by US legislators, will revive the old anti-trust spirit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Need a new type of anti-trust

I'm aware of Google and AWS designing their own silicon as they are generally moving ahead of the market (i.e. lower power consumption) or in a different direction to the market (i.e. 25Gbps at a time the mainstream market was moving to 40Gbps).

Mellanox is an interesting choice - I would have expected cloud-scale to benefit from cheaper Ethernet (and I acknowledge that Mellanox do provide Ethernet hardware but nothing particularly special when compared to Broadcom/Intel) over Mellanox's specialty of infiniband adapters and switches.

The question is whether infiniband would benefit a cloud-scale data centre - you definitely get improved performance with infiniband (lower latency, performance much closer to PCI-E limits than Ethernet solutions) but at increased cost, reduced availability and the need to convert back to Ethernet at some point which may mitigate any gains.

And I suspect Arista maybe very unhappy losing their main customer...