Cloud Computing: Plexxi will reinvent networking for a scaled out era
December 5, 2012
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.
Plexxi has made a new networking box that it calls a switch, but is radically different from the switches on the market today. The switch contains software plus an optical transceiver that link to other Plexxi boxes to form a fast connection between thousands of servers.
The enterprise infrastructure of the late 90s and early aughts is no match for the demands of webscale companies like Google or Facebook, or even cloud providers like Amazon. Thus, the giants in the web and cloud worlds are demanding new infrastructure and remaking the world of computing for their own needs…
These giants are deconstructing the server, rethinking the data center and building new databases. And they are also rethinking how they build out networks. To that end several companies have latched onto the concept of software defined networks to help build an abstracted and programmable layer on top of the physical networking gear. This gives systems administrators more flexibility, but it doesn’t help with another problem that many data center providers face, creating faster equipment that can carry their escalating traffic…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/plexxi-will-reinvent-networking-for-a-scaled-out-era/