As we all recover from NVIDIA’s exhilarating GTC 2024 in San Jose last week, AI state-of-the-art news seems fast and furious. Nvidia’s latest Blackwell GPU announcement and Meta’s blog validating Ethernet for their pair of clusters with 24,000 GPUs to train on their Llama 3 large language model (LLM) made the headlines. Networking has come a long way, accelerating pervasive compute, storage, and AI workloads for the next era of AI. Our large customers across every market segment, as well as the cloud and AI titans, recognize the rapid improvements in productivity and unprecedented insights an ..read more

Welcome to the digital age, where the marvels of self-driving cars and sophisticated AI like ChatGPT grace our everyday lives. Yet, amidst these advancements, a battleground often goes unnoticed, hidden within the layers of our network infrastructures. It's a world where network teams are the unsung heroes, tirelessly working behind the scenes to keep our digital lifelines seamless and uninterrupted. Today, I want to take you on a journey through Network Observability, a beacon of hope in the relentless quest to avoid outages, understand the impact of change, and quickly and accurately root c ..read more

AWS Cloud WAN Tunnel-less Connect and Arista CloudEOS integrate to accelerate cloud onramp As cloud and multicloud adoption continue to evolve, public cloud providers like AWS continue to introduce more and more tools for enterprise IT to choose from. For example, customers can deploy a virtual router in a Transit VPC and BGP peer with AWS Cloud WAN to interconnect on-premises networks and AWS VPCs. However, GRE or IPsec tunnels are often required for the BGP peering, adding up the network complexity and increasing operational costs ..read more

Back in the early 2000s, store and forward networking was used by both market data providers, exchanges and customers executing electronic trading applications where the lowest latency execution can make the difference in a strategy from a profit to a loss. Moving closer to the exchange to reduce link latency, eliminating any unnecessary network hops, placing all feed handler and trading execution servers on the same switch to minimize transit time, and leveraging high-performance 10Gb NICs with embedded FPGAs all contributed to the ongoing effort to squeeze out every last microsecond to exec ..read more

Recently I attended the 50th golden anniversary of Ethernet at the Computer History Museum. It was a reminder of how familiar and widely deployed Ethernet is and how it has evolved by orders of magnitude. Since the 1970s, it has progressed from a shared collision network at 2.95 megabits in the file/print/share era to the promise of Terabit Ethernet switching in the AI/ML era. Legacy Ethernot* alternatives such as Token Ring, FDDI, and ATM generally get subsumed by Ethernet. I believe history is going to repeat itself for AI networks ..read more

The perimeter of networks is changing and collapsing. In a zero trust network, no one and no thing is trusted from inside or outside of the enterprise network without verification or network access control (NAC). However, for years, organizations have been saddled with bolt-on NAC  technologies that deliver cost complexity while failing to be effective. Instead, security-conscious organizations are shifting to a “microperimeter” enterprise that embeds security into the network infrastructure as the proactive way to defend today’s wider attack surface ..read more

The evolution of WAN architectures has historically paralleled that of application architectures. When we primarily connected terminals to mainframes, the WAN architecture was largely point-to-point links connecting back to data center facilities. As traffic converged to remove OpEx-intensive parallel network structures, the WAN evolved to architectures that enabled site-to-site connectivity in a full mesh or configurable mesh and then enabled multi-tenancy for carrier cost optimization ..read more

The AI industry has taken us by storm, bringing supercomputers, algorithms, data processing and training methods into the mainstream. The rapid ramp of large language inference models combined with Open AI's ChatGPT has captured the interest and imagination of people worldwide. Generative AI applications promise benefits to just about every industry. New types of AI applications are expected to improve productivity on a wide range of tasks, be it marketing image creation for ads, video games or customer support. These generative large language models with over 100 billion parameters are advan ..read more

Whether it is something as simple as what kind of coffee to order for your commute to the office, which route to take to avoid traffic, or in my case, whether to support the USA or England in the 2022 world cup group stage game, we all make a myriad of choices every day ..read more

A pioneer in cloud networking for the last decade, Arista has become synonymous with elastic scaling and programmable provisioning through a modern data-driven software stack. Legacy networks with manual box-by-box configurations for production and testing have led to cumbersome and complex practices. Arista leads the industry in cloud automation built on an open foundation ..read more