The networking infrastructure market is more dynamic and interesting than it’s been in decades—and AI is going to make it more interesting.
All of this has dozens of networking player positioning for new markets that have been relatively static for decades. Cisco has dominated the networking market since the Internet bubble days, with estimates of 50-60% market share in enterprise and datacenter networking markets. This lack of competitive dynamics has made the market a big dull. But that’s started changing in recent years, with competitors such as Arista Networks taking share in the cloud hyperscale markets.
The first thing to understand is that AI networking often has different requirements from traditional networking. The transition from general-purpose computing to accelerated computing requires new software and distributed networking architectures to connect, move, and process data at lightning-fast speeds, with very low latency and almost no tolerance for data loss. This isn’t networking in your local coffee shop.
Training and inference both call for features not present in traditional or general-purpose client-server networks or, for that matter, in high performance computing networks based on that paradigm. The market for AI networking has this far been described as Infiniband vs. Ethernet,, because NVIDIA’s early lead in connecting GPUs with networking was focused on Infiniband technology, which has special low-latency and lossless characteristics. However, Ethernet solutions are now coming to market, and NVIDIA also has Ethernet-based technology with its Spectrum-X platform. As more Ethernet-based solutions come to market, the AI networking will broaden out.
Large, established networking vendors such as Arista, Cisco, Broadcom, Juniper, HPE, and Nokia have joined the UEC to pursue these goals. In this group, the forthcoming merger of Juniper and HPE looms large, giving the combined networking company more scale that is expected to make it the number-two by market share to Cisco.