AI Drives the Ethernet and InfiniBand Switch Market
NETWORKComputing, Saturday, January 27th, 2024
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
With the growing adoption of artificial intelligence over the past 12 months, data center networking infrastructure is being pushed to its limits, with enterprises and cloud operators increasing capacity and looking at wholesale infrastructure improvements to meet demand.
Each segment of the data center operation is expecting an increase in spending, including the data center switch market, which a recent report by the Dell'Oro Group forecasts will expand by 50% this year.
While most of the growth in the past in the switch market has come from front-end networks, Sameh Boujelbene of the Dell'Oro Group said in a release: 'This rapid growth 'of AI' necessitates the deployment of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of accelerated nodes. Connecting these accelerated nodes in large clusters requires a data center-scale fabric, known as the AI back-end network, which differs from the traditional front-end network used mostly to connect general-purpose servers.'
This may force data center operators to rewire parts of the data centers to be fully optimized for cloud workloads, potentially increasing the costs of running the data center.