Ye olde server consolidation has made Cisco push top-of-rack switching to 100G
Server consolidation has led Cisco to boost the speed of top-of-rack switches to 100G.
Key points
- At the Cisco Live event in Melbourne, Australia, this week, Cisco’s senior veep for datacenter and internet infrastructure, Kevin Wollenweber, said one reason the company created the device is that modern servers often feature a pair of fast network interface cards.
- The density of computing power those processors provide has led chipmakers and server manufacturers to suggest replacing handfuls of machines running older, power-guzzling Xeons and Epycs with boxes running more efficient sixth-gen chips.
- The exec admitted that the 100G ports may be overkill for a modest collection of new servers, but argued users recognize it won’t be long before they grow into the excess capacity – perhaps as they use more agentic AI applications.
Wollenweber said Cisco realized it had “tons” of switches that offer 25G ports but felt it had a gap in its range for non-AI scenarios like server consolidation that produced increased data flows.
The Register hears it’s not uncommon to achieve 6:1 server consolidation ratios when moving from third- or fourth-generation Xeons or Epycs to current models.
Additional details
- Joe Vaccaro, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager for Network Platform and Assurance, told The Register he believes network administrators don’t feel threatened by suggestions from AI agents when they concern familiar, routine, low-risk tasks that IT pros are confident the agents can handle.
- The twin cards are needed because sixth-gen server processors from Intel and AMD offer dozens, or even hundreds, of physical processor cores and therefore generate a lot of traffic.
- Cisco sees traffic from AI agents stressing the north-south connections that link organizations to the cloud and also driving much more east-west traffic across internal networks.
- Cisco’s Canvas agentic operations platform aims to at least make humans aware when their attention is needed, by detecting problems and offering to make repairs.
- Users who make that move can pack many more server cores into the same rack.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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