Nile's changing up how Enterprises design, build, and consume Access Networks at Network Field Day 32

Nile presented at Networking Field Day 32 on July 26, 2023 and they presented on their Enterprise Networking solutions. Nile has built out a set of networking solutions that focuses on the enterprise and commercial market and they are selling the solution in a Network as a Service model. The overview of what they provide:

• Wired and Wireless LAN as a Service
• Guaranteed Network Performance
• Zero Trust
• IT Simplicity

It seems they are competitors to Meraki, Mist, and Aruba from an enterprise solution offering and to Ubiquiti and Microtik in the commercial market. All of these competitors have strong market positions and install bases. This is a simplistic comparison, but for the purpose of understanding what market groups they are potentially suited for, it works just fine.

Here is their overview:

There are several more YouTube videos available, you can find them all over at the Tech Field Day 32 Nile page.

But in typical NFD fashion, the most interesting and relevant session ended up being the last video and the poor presenter was given the least amount of time because everyone else was unable to keep on track prior.

Note: If Nile presents at another field day, I suggest they START with this demo, focus on doing Q&A around it and expand everything else after it. Honestly, the first 30-45 mins of the overall timeslot was a waste of time and could have been cut (except the marketing people likely wanted that content - stop listening to them, you can record that stuff on your own, you don't need a bunch of delegates in the room for that part). If you are going to watch anything, watch this one:

My quick thoughts on what Nile presented:

Of course the IPv6 question was asked and they built a new generation of networking gear and solution without IPv6 as a first class citizen. I don't know if that is really forgivable in the current market. While I understand the US Federal Government is not their primary customer, or even a secondary, there will definitely be organizations that need IPv6. It is just such a glaring misstep I can't really take the rest of the product seriously, so you know my bias going into this. 

They also need to explain and position their place in the market a bit more clearly. A simple elevator pitch that says something like: "We are Meraki or Mist generation 2.0" or something similar to give a reference point. I get that they are doing Network as a Service (NaaS) and their billing/revenue model is slightly different but it puts them in front of the right general audience. The current pitch and explanation is too broad and doesn't narrow the field for buyers to understand what they do and why.

Effectively, they are wrapping together hardware, software, support, and installer/operator easy of administration in a recurring revenue model. I'm not sure that is revolutionary at this point. They did invest to brand their own hardware solution. I'm not sure putting simple diagrams on the equipment makes it unique in terms of IT Simplicity. Their management UI looks like a combo of Mist, Meraki and Ubiquiti so nothing super unique going on there, though that might be a plus, people who have used those other solutions can figure theirs out a bit faster.

I will be honest, I am not 100% sure what the large/important differentiator is for Nile. I either missed the key points in the presentation or they need to hone their message of how they are different, unique, and valuable for a customer. It just wasn't clear to me why I would want them versus any other product solution set out there right now. It should be the first, second, and third thing they talk about. I'm not even sure it was mentioned specifically.

I will keep an eye on Nile and what they are doing, but honestly, just like with Meraki, I won't take them seriously until they can work with IPv6 as a fully supported networking protocol.

 - Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD32. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own along with the ideas and thoughts.

Broadcom's AI Networking Solutions at Networking Field Day 32

Broadcom presented at Networking Field Day 32 on July 26, 2023 and they presented on their AI Networking solutions. These are products and architectures that address the needs of those building out AI data center focused networks. Obviously the design will work for regular data center workloads too. albeit, suboptimal because the design is focused on addressing AI workloads and not a more general workload. The attributes that Broadcom define for what makes an AI Network unique are:

• Fewer flows (low entropy)
• High bandwidth flows (elephant flows due to the large amount of data sets being moved around)
• Synchronized and bursty traffic
• Links are saturated in micro-seconds (<<RTT)
• Training jobs run for long periods of time (hours/days)
• Tail latency impacts job completion time significantly

And they shared some interesting info about "time spent in network" is impacted by:

• Transient oversubscription
• Flow collisions and link failures
• Incast - many GPUs sends into one or a few GPU(s)

Broadcom says the solution is to build a Clos fabric that makes use of a receiver-based credit control process that can pace the senders accurately. This means it is impossible to oversubscribe the Clos fabric and therefore you can leverage techniques like packet spraying with receiver ordering. It is worth watching the presentation on YouTube to understand what they are doing and why. You can check that out here:

There are specific videos on the Tomahawk AI Interconnect here:

And also on Jericho3 AI here:

And their wrap up on AI/ML Data Center Fabric solutions can be found here:

My quick thoughts on what Broadcom presented:

I wasn't aware (more likely I haven't been paying attention to what is happening in AI/ML like I should be) that there was this much specific network design work going into addressing AI workloads. While I understand there are a lot of AI/ML projects, I wasn't aware that so many private firms might want this solution architecture for their own needs versus running on leased cloud models.

Clearly there is a pricing advantage to running stuff at scale on your own hardware (in terms of reduced network data ingress/egress costs, compute cycles, and having dedicated GPU access) otherwise Broadcom wouldn't be building these sorts of solutions. It seems most of the large scale cloud providers have built something similar on their own or have requested that Broadcom address a gap in what traditional Ethernet fabrics can provide.

What will be interesting to me is if this is a short term industry change to address a narrow vertical or if this will become the new default Ethernet fabric architecture because AI/ML workloads will become common place DC workloads. I'm not convinced it will go that way, perhaps a hybrid of specific AI/ML Ethernet fabrics that are L3 connected to traditional DC focused Ethernet fabrics to attempt to give an organization the best of both worlds.

You can also get Drew Conry-Murray's thoughts on Broadcom's presentation over at his Packet Pushers blog post.

 - Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD32. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own along with the ideas and thoughts.