As the OCP U.S. Summit 2016 continues, a big part of the excitement is in finding out how each company responds to announcements made by its partners and competitors. Microsoft’s new Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) networking OS system is responsible for a significant chunk of that buzz, but discussions of the infrastructure allowing these new implementations have their own activity going.

Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, sat down to speak with Kevin Deierling, VP of marketing at Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., about what he sees as major developments in the field right now and where things will be going in the near future.

OCP expansion

Deierling started off by noting how much growing interest there is in the OCP event and its related subjects, as well as how many innovators were present to generate more activity. Mellanox had its own share of announcements at the convention, including developments with adapters, establishing a partnership with Cumulus Networks, Inc., addressing Microsoft’s new SONiC system, and more.

Asked what he saw as some of the biggest changes for open computing recently, Deierling said, “We’re seeing a change [from] a compute-centric infrastructure to a network-centric infrastructure,” and he noted higher-scale bandwidth handling as one of the leading factors contributing to these shifts. “This 25/50/100 [gig] space is going to be huge,” he stated.

Storage and scaling

In addition to networking models making big steps, Deierling identified storage as playing a major role. “I think one of the key things is storage … The infrastructure upgrade here is really pretty transparent … You don’t have to rip and replace, just swap out a transceiver.”

He pointed to Netflix, whose popular but bandwidth-heavy services have pushed a number of innovations, as being an early enterprise to pick up on a fundamental part of the puzzle. “I think what Netflix recognized is … you have to scale very quickly.” From their basic model to the distribution across various platforms, including mobile and its countless Internet of Things (IoT) linkages, Deierling reinforced the position that finding ways to improve data-processing turn-around will be absolutely essential over the next few years.

“There’s a ton of things that are going to be generating data … that people don’t even recognize … All that data needs to get to a data-center, get processed and redistributed,” he said. One way to address this is with composable infrastructures, which have been gaining visibility as their viability increases. As Deierling put it, “You can take the best hardware platforms, the best software platforms … and it depends on what you want to do … you can put them together to meet your use-cases.”

Looking forward, Deierling was eager to meet the challenges of networking, which he saw as inevitably moving to wider and wider bandwidth. Moving from challenges getting the standards for 25-gig and 50-gig implemented by the IEEE to the future, he said, “We know that we’re not going to stop there, we know that 200-gig and 400-gig are on the horizon.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OCP U.S. Summit 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE