{"id":1048,"date":"2008-01-28T10:09:25","date_gmt":"2008-01-28T17:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1048"},"modified":"2008-01-28T10:09:25","modified_gmt":"2008-01-28T17:09:25","slug":"the_billiondoll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1048","title":{"rendered":"The billion-dollar switch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Talk about your big switches. Cisco today is unveiling<\/a> the largest network switch ever, the Nexus 7000, which is able to transfer 15 terabytes<\/strike> terabits per second. That’s equivalent, the company says, to sending digital copies of all the movies in NetFlix’s inventory in 38.4 seconds. Geared to facilitate cloud computing, which demands the rapid exchange of massive quantities of data over long distances, the Nexus switch has required about $1 billion in R&D investment over the last four years, according<\/a> to the New York Times. Microsoft has said it plans to use the new switch for its expanding set of Live web apps.<\/p>\n

The billion-dollar switch underscores a couple of big trends in the IT world. First, it’s another indication that IT’s traditional heavy-metal giants – not just Cisco but IBM, HP, Sun, EMC and others – are counting on the shift to utility-style computing to produce a wave of new investment in the modernized data centers required for large-scale cloud computing. The virtualization and centralization of computing assets promises in the long-run to reduce the capital that corporations have to dump into IT machinery, but in the short run it’s going to require big outlays for new equipment, both by large companies looking to consolidate their data centers and by the suppliers of web apps and other utility services.<\/p>\n

Second, it shows that scale is becoming more important than ever on the supply side. Cisco’s smaller competitors will be hard-pressed to match its R&D outlays as they rush to match the capabilities of the Nexus – and of the even more powerful switches that will surely follow. Whether you’re building utility data centers or supplying the equipment that goes into them, you need to spend a lot of cash. So count on more consolidation in the infrastructure sector.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Other reports<\/a> put Cisco’s investment in the Nexus at $250 million; so maybe it’s only the quarter-billion-dollar switch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Talk about your big switches. Cisco today is unveiling the largest network switch ever, the Nexus 7000, which is able to transfer 15 terabytes terabits per second. That’s equivalent, the company says, to sending digital copies of all the movies in NetFlix’s inventory in 38.4 seconds. Geared to facilitate cloud computing, which demands the rapid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}