Hamilton: Networking Ripe for Innovation

We’ve previously highlighted research from James Hamilton of Amazon Web Services on cost of different components of data center operations. In his latest blog post, James discusses opportunities for savings and improved efficiencies in data center networking.

“The network equipment business model is broken,” James writes. “We love the server business model where we have competition at the CPU level, more competition at the server level, and an open source solution for control software. In the networking world, it’s a vertically integrated stack and this slows innovation and artificially holds margins high. It’s a mainframe business model.”

But that may soon be changing, he says, noting competing merchant silicon and switch designs from Broadcom, Marvell, and Fulcrum. “We don’t yet have the open source software stack but there are some interesting possibilities on the near term horizon with OpenFlow being perhaps the most interesting enabler.”

Read more at Data Center Networks Are in My Way.

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.