Ethernet edges out InfiniBand for high-bandwidth data center connectivity
Ethernet recently celebrated its 50th anniversary as the most widely deployed technology for enterprise network connectivity. The final frontier for Ethernet is deep in bowels of the data center, where its high-bandwidth, low-latency characteristics have made InfiniBand the preferred choice for high-performance computing systems.
But AI presents a market opportunity too attractive for the Ethernet vendors to pass up. Thus the creation of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, led by Cisco, HPE, Arista and other familiar names, dedicated to supersizing Ethernet for AI workloads.
The consortium is now at around 55 member companies and Synopsis, Inc., just announced the industry’s first Ultra Ethernet IP solutions to meet the demand for standards-based, high-bandwidth, low-latency HPC and AI accelerator interconnects.
Industry veteran Zeus Kerravala predicts that 2025 will be the year that Ethernet becomes the protocol of choice for AI-based networking. “There is currently a holy war regarding InfiniBand versus Ethernet for networking for AI with InfiniBand having taken the early lead,” Kerravala says.
Ethernet has seen tremendous advancements over the last few years, and its performance is now on par with InfiniBand, he says, citing a recent test conducted by World Wide Technology. “In 2025, Ethernet sales will outpace InfiniBand for AI networking with Cisco and Arista being the big two,” predicts Kerravala.
The rise of single-vendor SASE
SASE, defined by Gartner as a service offering that includes SD-WAN plus zero-trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), and network firewalling, requires vendors to combine multiple products into a single suite.
