What if the largest Ethernet networks we see today are just precursors, initial steps on the path to what’s been called hyper-scale cloud networking?
“Hyper” is the term used generally for something almost unfathomably and exceptionally large. We might say that a regional group of airports is a small air transport network, a national one a larger network, a continental one a big network but the global air-transport system is a hyper network with hundreds of airports, thousands of planes, millions of flights a year and billions of passengers.
A hyper-scale Ethernet network will be global in scale and embrace tens of thousands of cables and switches, millions of ports, and trillions, perhaps quadrillions, of packets of data flowing across the network a year, possibly even more.
Depiction of Internet network.
Amir Efrati of the WSJ explained that Google’s foray into the social gaming world highlighted the company’s “latest attempt” to capture users and advertising dollars which are “increasingly flowing” to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.