The networking giant last week unveiled the catchily named N9348C8D-H2, a 1U device packing 48 100G SFP-DD ports and eight 400G QSFP-DD uplinks. 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 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. 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 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.
