Since 2017, no fewer than ten vendors have launched Smart Network Interface Cards or Smart NICs. The Smart NIC market is projected to become a $600 M market by 2024, or 23% of the total Ethernet adapter market. Vendors have developed or are developing innovative solutions to gain entry in the expanding Cloud data center market, and the emerging telco edge market.

Smart NICs, with an on-board processor, can provide a wide range of offload benefits in the following scenarios:

• For a Public Cloud service provider operating a large-scale data center, Smart NICs could free up valuable CPU cores to run business applications for the end-user, potentially enabling higher server utilization.
• Smart NICs are offered to meet a wide range of offloads. Some of these include transport and storage protocol offloads such as RoCE, TCP, NVMe-over-Fabrics.
• Certain classes of Smart NICs are programmable and can be tailored for a wide range of applications and retooled to meet new requirements.

Smart NICs, however, are not without drawbacks and the following areas would need to be addressed before we see broader adoption:

• Smart NICs are priced at a significant premium over that of a standard NIC. This price premium can be 5-10X higher given the same port speed and need to come down especially for volume production.
• Smart NICs can draw anywhere from 20W up to 80W of power, which is not non-consequential on a per unit server basis.
• Given the programmability and complexity of Smart NICs, they can consume significant engineering resources to develop and debug, resulting in a lengthy and costly implementation.

Given the above considerations the major Cloud service providers and IC vendors have developed Smart NIC adapters based on different IC solutions: ARM-based SoC, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and custom ASICs. Each of these solutions offers varying degrees of offloads and programmability. In general, ARM-based SoCs and FPGAs are fabricated with programmable cores and can be adapted to a wide range of applications. However, the drawback of the programmability is the greater extent of engineering resources and lead time needed to bring the products to market. Custom ASICs tend to be hard-coded with customization generally limited to vendor-provided application tool sets. As products start to ramp and the market reaches consensus on product definition, we expect the following three categories of Ethernet adapters to emerge: 1) traditional or standard NICs, 2) non-programmable Smart NICs that are ASIC-based, and 3) programmable Smart NICs, that are ARM-based or FPGA based.

Network IC vendors that either currently have Smart NIC adapters or are planning to launch one have a wide range of solutions and target market segments. Notable vendors include Broadcom, Ethernity Networks, Intel, Marvell, Mellanox, Napatech, Netronome, Pensando, and Xilinx. The major Cloud service providers have developed their own solutions, further fragmenting market.

Our long-term outlook of the Smart NIC market by market segments is as follows:

• Top 4 U.S. Cloud: In 2019, the Top 4 U.S. Cloud service providers, with Amazon in particular, drove more than 90% of the Smart NIC market by port shipments. This may be a challenging market for Ethernet adapter vendors to enter given that some of these Cloud service providers are likely to continue to develop their own solutions.
• Other Cloud: These segments include Chinese Cloud service providers, such as Alibaba and Tencent, and Tier 2 Cloud service providers such as Apple and Oracle. As these companies scale data center capacity higher, Smart NICs could be a solution to enable higher utilization. These companies may not necessarily have the resources to develop their own Smart NICs, and are likely to seek 3^rd party solutions from adapter vendors.
• Telco Operators: This segment is increasingly looking to shift core network services to run on x86 servers, thus, Smart NICs could be used to offload network function virtualization. Certain adapter vendors are also targeting the emerging edge computing market as well, as Smart NICs is complementary to multi-access edge computing (MEC) nodes to satisfy low-latency requirements.
• Enterprise: Generally, enterprise data centers tend to operate at a smaller scale, and would have less incentives to maximize utilization. Many enterprises would also rely on vendors to provide a solution with software implementation in place. Certain workloads, mainly enterprise storage arrays, are being developed with Smart NICs to facilitate NVMe-over-Fabrics connectivity.

As the Smart NIC markets continue to evolve, we believe the success of each vendor depends on whether its solution is a worthwhile upgrade over standard NICs from a performance, price, power consumption, and implementation perspective in their respective target markets. In 2020, activity level is high, as vendors work with end-users to complete product evaluation cycles. We expect to see volume ramp from a greater mix of vendors next year, as some of the short-comings mentioned above are addressed, realizing the benefits of Smart NICs.

Every year vendors rally around certain words and the RSA Conference 2020 was no different. It had been about ten years since my last RSA conference after regularly attending in the 2000s. After nearly 40 hours of meetings and vendor conversations at Moscone Center in San Francisco, I kept hearing how vendors were inventing (or reinventing) themselves to deliver SASE, SD-WAN, Zero Trust Networks, and/or SOAR with a sprinkle, or even a good helping, of SaaS.  Let’s break down what’s behind the buzz:

1. SD-WAN (Software Defined – Wide Area Network):

On the first day, the IT gods gave us routers for each branch office and expensive dedicated links. Eventually, businesses got tired of paying the high price for dedicated links. Plus, they wanted to improve the user/app experience that at times could get unstable, full of lag and generally poor. Behold: the SD-WAN routing solution was developed that can make snazzy forwarding decisions based on rich set of inputs, including user, app, latency, congestion and more, to deliver better user/app experience over cheaper commodity Internet links. It turns out many of these SD-WAN solutions also aim to provide network security. But many are not as effective as pure-play security solutions, such as FW/NGFWs.  Just so happens that the barrier to entry to implement SD-WAN isn’t like doing carrier routing. Thus, several security vendors have added sufficient routing capability to claim SD-WAN functionality.  At RSA 2020, I had some good discussions with Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks, both of which are investing heavily in the space.

2. Zero Trust Network:

Back in early 2000s I helped get Network Access Control (NAC), an ancestor to Zero Trust Networks, off the ground. I ran the IETF RADIUS extensions working group, which developed some of the open authentication standards leveraged by NAC and, now, Zero Trust Networks.  While NAC flamed out for being ahead of its time, I found Zero Trust Network solutions at RSA conference as a more usable, superset form of NAC solutions from my yesteryear.  Zero Trust Network solutions are all about implementing a multi-segmented network by orchestrating between endpoints, access edge (campus, branch, cloud user edge), and applications/data being accessed.  At RSA 2020, the folks at Cisco and Juniper Networks walked me through their campus network solutions.

3. SaaS (Security-as-a-Service):

While most think SaaS equals Software-as-a-Service, I prefer to think of it as an acronym for Security-as-a-Service. Boxes/appliances will never completely disappear, but the clear trend is to deliver services as a service where you want it and how you want it. Whether it’s NGFW/FW, email security, ADC/WAFs, web gateways, IPS, DLP, or ATP you can get it in a SaaS model, whether it’s a virtual machine, hosted service, or true pay-as-you go offering. Every vendor at RSA, or least everyone that wanted to be hip and cool, had a SaaS play.  This is a very exciting space for security vendors that I plan on digging deeper here at Dell’Oro.

4. SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response):

Everyone at RSA 2020 wanted to SOAR in some way. But to my mind, SOAR boiled down to the cool new name for a central dashboard for policy, visibility, and analytics. Fifteen years ago, we called SOAR’S predecessor the “Single Pane of Glass.” But with a decade and a half of refinements, SOAR seems to be soaring higher than the pain caused by the early-gen single panes of glass. At RSA 2020, I noticed the focus on bringing together a vendor’s product/solution portfolio with complimentary, third-party solutions. It looked like vendors had finally internalized the maxim that security can’t and shouldn’t always be delivered by a single vendor. Like SaaS, every hip vendor had a SOAR-type offering, whether or not it was referred to as SOAR.

5. SASE (Secure Access Service Edge):

I saved the SASE (pronounced “sassy”) kid for last. As the new kid on the block, SASE is in that awkward phase that all young buzzwords/markets go through when industry lacks black-white clarity on what’s in it and who’s delivering it. This reminds me of the days when early cloud providers were hammering out the technicalities of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

From what I can tell, we’ll continue in the storming and form phase a bit longer. But through the dust I can see that SASE, at its core, is anchored by an in-the-cloud gateway service. Thus, at minimum, SASE will replace on-prem security web gateway appliances with a side helping of Cloud Access Security Broker, Data Loss Prevention, applied threat intelligence, and even FW/NGFW capabilities brought together under a single administrative panel. At RSA, I had the pleasure of talking with the zScaler, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, and ForcePoint SASE teams.

In future blogs, I’ll dig deeper into why I think these ideas caught wind. But for now, keep an eye out for a year filled with SASE security clouds over SD-WAN and Zero Trust Networks with some SaaS and SOAR… at least until RSA 2021. If you attended RSA 2020 and have different takeaways, drop me a note at mauricio@delloro.com. I always appreciate other perspectives.

As I look to the future of the Wireless LAN (WLAN) market there are a few key trends that I’ll be watching for 2020:

• Wi-Fi 6 is racing ahead. We expect Wi-Fi 6 will rise significantly, particularly as vendors bring to market lower-priced 2×2 Wi-Fi 6 access points. Concurrently, we’ll pay close attention to Wi-Fi 6 access points driving the Campus adoption of NBASE-T (Ethernet 2.5 Gbps and 5.0 Gbps).
• Macroeconomic uncertainties impact near-term corporate spending. We expect 2020 to be a soft market for wireless LAN as short-term economic deterioration unfolds in many regions in the world. For example, in Europe Brexit is disrupting the general flow of business. Economists from the leading world banks have pulled down their GDP growth forecasts from 1.5% to 1.1% in 2020—a significant reduction. The good news is they predict a rebound in 2021. In the USA, according to the senior executives of wireless LAN manufacturers, large companies are delaying purchases as trade tensions create economic uncertainty. Economists forecast USA GDP growth to slow in 2020 to 1.8%, down from 2.3%.
• More Wi-Fi 6 deployment in China. Although government incentives for 5G in large public venues has dampened wireless LAN sales in China, we learned that in 2020 Wi-Fi 6 will be big, particularly with the manufacturing vertical industry. We’ll be watching for innovation and use cases of Wi-Fi 6 deployments within the manufacturing sector.
• 6 GHz turbo charging Wi-Fi 6. The availability of new unlicensed 6 GHz spectrum will increase the performance of Wi-Fi significantly. This will be the first time in over 20 years that additional mid-band spectrum has been made available to Wi-Fi, yet the use of Wi-Fi technology has increased on a massive scale. This is rocking the Wi-Fi market. The additional capacity would enable faster data throughput and lower latency—essentially turbo-charging Wi-Fi 6 and fortifying its competitiveness with cellular in the enterprise.

  The next hurdle to making 6 GHz available is managing the spectrum. The incumbents currently using the spectrum are asking that all Wi-Fi devices connect to an Automated Frequency Control System, whereas the Wi-Fi manufacturers are asking for all indoor and very low power devices not be required to connect. We will be watching with keen interest what rules the FCC structures for managing the 6 GHz spectrum, which may be in the March / April time frame.

Major changes the new decade may bring to the data center switching market

The start of the new year is forecasting time at Dell’Oro Group. Like clockwork, our analysts update their five-year forecasts for the respective markets they track. We review the prior year’s performance and its implications for the new year. We also review our notes from conferences and meetings, and the insights we gathered from our interviews with key decision makers and distinguished engineers in the industry, including system and component vendors, system integrators, Cloud service providers (SPs), Telco SPs, and large enterprises.

As the start of both a new year and a new decade, this is an especially exciting time to share with you the major trends we’ll be watching in 2020 and beyond:

1. Macroeconomic conditions will play an important role in shaping the demand environment in 2020. We expect that ongoing trade friction between the U.S. and China, combined with the U.S. presidential election, may create market uncertainty.
2. Macroeconomic headwinds, among other issues, will impact spending by Tier 2 and 3 Cloud SPs as well as large enterprises, which may rely temporarily on Tier 1 Public Cloud Providers to expand capacity during this period of uncertainty. However, we expect spending from large Tier 2 Cloud SPs as well as enterprises to accelerate once we move past these issues, as it will be more economical for them to build and operate their own data centers.
3. Due to the delay in high-volume availability of 400 Gbps optics, the 400 Gbps upgrade cycle (outside of Google and Amazon) will not start to materialize until late 2020/early 2021. Facebook is expected to start its speed upgrade cycle in late 2020 (driven by the availability of Broadcom’s Tomahawk 4 chips). In the meantime, Microsoft’s 400 Gbps story is now slated for early 2021, driven by the availability of 400 Gbps ZR optics for data center interconnect.
4. The 400 Gbps refresh cycle at Google and Amazon did not have an impact on the performance of any of the branded switch vendors, as these two Cloud SPs mostly deploy white box switches in their networks. However, when Facebook and Microsoft initiate their network upgrade cycles, all eyes will be on market-share gainers and market-share losers.
5. As China tries to develop its home-grown supply chain, we expect to see more advances over the next few years. In particular, we expect to see progress in switch silicon development, which will further fuel the competition in the space. Over the last few years, numerous emerging vendors have entered the merchant switch silicon market, not to mention Cisco’s latest announcement that it is willing to sell its chips to third parties. It will be interesting to watch which players will continue to be in business five years from now and which ones will run out of steam, as the market cannot support the current number of chip suppliers.
6. White box adoption has mostly been driven by a few large Cloud SPs. However, as this segment becomes increasingly crowded, we expect white box vendors to try to expand to Tier 2 Cloud SPs, large enterprises, and Telco SPs. We expect the next battle ground between white box and branded switch vendors to be large Tier 2 Cloud SPs, Telco SPs, and the high-end portion of the enterprise market. We predict that branded switch vendors will expand their offerings of disaggregated systems as an answer to the threat from white box vendors.
7. Optics will play an increasingly crucial role in the data center switch market. The availability of high-volume, low-cost optics has been and will remain the enabler of all speed transitions. Additionally, as network speed increases beyond 800 Gbps, pluggable optics will hit density and power issues. When this occurs, the industry will be forced to adopt alternative technologies, such as co-packaged optics (CPO). We expect such a transition to bring major disruptions to the supply chain as it will require a new business model. We further expect to see numerous acquisitions, consolidations, and partnerships among switch chip vendors, switch system vendors, and optical transceiver vendors. It will be interesting to watch which players will thrive and turn the transition into an opportunity to gain share in the market, and which players will fail navigating through the transition.
8. As adoption of 400 Gbps speeds and higher increases in the coming years, installation of DWDM optical modules into switches instead of DWDM transport systems for Data Center Interconnect (DCI) is expected to increase.
9. We expect the number of deployable use cases for data center switching products to continue to expand outside the data center, driven by improved merchant silicon as well as the improved capabilities of network operating systems (NOS) to take advantage of these advances in chip technologies.
10. We expect 100 Gbps SerDes technology to drive new ways for connect servers to Top of Rack (ToR) switches. 100 Gbps SerDes will be associated with a lot of channel loss, which makes it difficult for conventional Direct Attach Copper (DAC) to cover distances longer than 3m and to continue to be used for server-to-ToR connectivity.
11. We expect that machine learning and artificial intelligence applications may drive new ways to interconnect pools of resources (compute/storage/memory) inside the data center.