Posts by Lior Paster

Back to ASICs: Mellanox pumps up Ethernet speed to 400Gbps

Re: What about the NICs?

400GbE will be used for now to connect between switches, but around 2020 or 2021 PCIE Gen5 will actually enable 400GbE NIC throughput.

Re: By next year....

That is completely untrue... Mellanox still supports NIC's sold 8 years ago, and Switches sold 8 years ago. Mellanox innovates and stands behind its products. If you have a problem, be specific.

SGI plunks Windows on big Altix UV supers

It's not a cluster...

It runs a single OS image on all 256 processors (2048 cores) and the whole memory block. It's like a HUGE desktop... It doesn't need an OS instance for each server like a cluster would.

Single OS makes life VERY easy for administration and management. One memory block and all CPU's under one OS is a HUGE thing for some application that DON'T scale on clusters!

It's a standard x86 box running standard Linux. That's a huge thing! who wants to deal with Power or Itenium or Unix??? everyone now wants to use standard OS and off-the-shelf software and IO, and SGI can run STANDARD x86 64bit SUSE and RHEL and Windows on UV, and that's the way to go because these are simple, standard operating systems of the future.

Voltaire's sales plummet in Q1

It's not just bandwidth

IB provides very low latency that the Financial Services firms, HPC, and Research always needs. 10Gig is orders of magnitude "slower" although it is getting better.

Also, IB is still about 50% cheaper then 10Gig. If you consider that IB has X4 bandwidth, then IB is 80-90% cheaper per GB the 10Gig.

Voltaire is well positioned for both IB and 10Gig market and now that Cisco is burned, Volt has a great opportunity to work with big players.