theCUBE Conversations: Broadcom strategy chief discusses the network
Emerging technologies are reshaping the enterprise data center, consolidating compute and storage while putting more strain on the network. Greg Scherer, the vice president of server and storage strategy at Broadcom, appeared on the first episode of theCUBE Conversations to discuss IT disruption with Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman.
Scherer kicks off the segment with a brief recap of the latest developments from his company, including the launch of the Trident II Ethernet chip and, on the other end of the infrastructure spectrum, the recent debut of the BCM5725 baseboard management controller. The latter product addresses increasing demand for open standards-based commodity solutions that can keep up with the rapid growth in information volumes, he details.
The BCM5725 is geared towards the cloud providers at the forefront of the Big Data revolution. These companies – along with web-scale giants like Google and Facebook – are driving efficiencies at hyperscale, a new paradigm of computing that is slowly but surely trickling down to the traditional enterprise. And with it come hyper-specialized network architectures and applications.
“Facebook…they do somewhere in the neighborhood of a petabytes of raw storage just in pictures a day. And then they store those in different image formats, so by the time they store the different image formats and they index it, they’re looking at north of 10 petabytes a day in terms of their storage growth,” Scherer says. “You can’t have a traditional filer or a traditional storage array to keep up with that. So you have to do some very specialized things in order to keep up with that kind of traffic.”
With flash storage taking rotating hard disk performance limitations out of the loop, the transport layer is becoming the bottleneck. To eliminate it, organizations are implementing distributed networks and building applications to make optimal use of IT resources, moving as little data as possible, Scherer explains.
Watch the full interview for more insight into the future of networking and Broadcom’s place in the market.
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