NETWORKING HARDWARE
“ Switches essentially work like modernised versions of the giant phone switch boards from decades ago ”
— Digital Realty
40 link speed of 400GB-per-second . This upgrade , according to Sanyal , is going to place more demand on the hardware that makes up a data centre ’ s servers - something that his company , Silicon Valley-based Innovium , is hoping to capitalise on .
Innovium was founded in 2015 with an ambitious goal in mind : to take a bite out of data centre chip goliath Broadcom . Headquartered just a few miles away from its challenger , Innovium , Broadcom is a $ 170bn tech monolith that has more or less cornered the market making chips that power the networking switches made by companies like Arista Networks and Cisco . Now , Innovium is coming for a piece of that pie . “ We have established ourselves as the only compelling silicon diversity option ,” said Sanyal in a recent interview . The upstart chipmaker recently secured another $ 170mn in venture capital funding , pushing its valuation past the unicorn threshold - a first for a startup making data centre hardware . Innovium is reportedly the only challenger to take a bite out of Broadcom ’ s market share so far . Rajiv Khemani , Cofounder and CEO of Innovium , commented in a press release that , “ We are delighted at the strong adoption at leading OEM , Cloud and ODM customers ... which
OCTOBER 2020