Tailoring networking to the cloud

...key applications, such as high-frequency trading, life sciences, biological DNA molecule development, advanced imaging, HPC verticals such as oil and gas, education and research.

What are the key challenges for datacentre managers today who are seeking to move to next-generation facilities?
Most important is just the construction of a datacentre — they have to worry about power, cooling and so on, but the next thing is to ask: do they go for a classic datacentre, or do they think about the combination of their storage, server and network in a different way from the past?

From a people point of view, you need a general practitioner. They need to understand what the server scaling looks like — same with storage and networking.

It's about understanding the traffic patterns. For example, one of the most widely adopted applications for us is high-frequency trading. We used to say latency doesn't matter, but now you can lose millions of dollars for each microsecond of latency. InfiniBand was the only technology that could achieve this, but now 10Gb Ethernet can do it too.

How will you compete with Cisco? Won't their Unified Computing approach lock you out?
We don't compete with them — Cisco's Unified Computing approach is about moving into the server business, and is a big play against HP and so on. We work with anyone's servers. Servers are very cost-conscious purchases with lots of factors. There's no overlap with Cisco: their focus is as one-stop shop with complete integration; ours is best-of-breed product.

Would you like Cisco to buy you?
Not particularly. We have our own value proposition and differentiation. Along the way, if things happen, that's very different from planning for things to happen.

Your blog talks a lot about high-performance computing and about datacentres/cloud. Are you splitting your forces by attacking two markets simultaneously?
They're the same market in different aspects. HPC has a heavy legacy of latency and web computing, but enterprise datacentres are hybrids.

Our sweet spot has been in HPC, but our expanding product line and road map is changing that.

HPC's need for low latency is our bread and butter, but the line between the HPC datacentre and the classic datacentre is getting thinner; they're not different audiences but different applications.

If this is the year of 10Gb, when will the year of 100Gb be?
I think 100Gb will be a relevant niche through to 2012 — there won't be mainstream 100Gb deployments for five to 10 years.

As a result of installing 10Gb, you'll start to need faster interconnects of either 40Gb or 100Gb. We have customers who are building multiple aggregated links already, so you'll see that happen.

But native 100Gb is still very expensive from an optics point of view — we need to see radical improvements in cost performance, and technology miniaturisation and design. There's a lot of work going into DWDM and optical wavelengths to improve this, but it's five to 10 years out.

Can you see 100Gb Ethernet going over copper?
The laws of physics are already challenging putting 10Gb over existing Cat-6 or Cat-7, so I think you'd need a new cable — Cat-8 or Cat-10 maybe — but fibre will be so widespread, so it may not matter. It's not a last-mile technology but an uplink technology and, for that, fibre is fine.