Data Center Networking Solutions

InfiniBand typically leads for tightly-coupled training at scale; high-speed Ethernet with RoCE is flexible and often sufficient for inference and mixed workloads. We design vendor-neutrally around your workload. The honest framing is this: InfiniBand is a purpose-built fabric with lossless behavior and adaptive routing designed in, which is why large training clusters keep choosing it, and the cost is a second technology for your team to operate. Ethernet gives you one operational model, a wider vendor pool, and staff who already know it, but lossless behavior has to be configured and kept correct through flow control and congestion notification, and a misconfigured RoCE fabric fails in ways that look like a slow model rather than a network fault. If most of your work is inference or single-node, Ethernet is usually the right answer. If it is multi-node training at scale, InfiniBand deserves serious consideration.

Yes, we design the topology and source the switches, adapters, and cabling as a coherent system integrated with your compute and storage. That includes the parts that are easy to leave off a bill of materials and expensive to add late: the transceiver on each end of every link, the correct cable lengths measured against the real rack elevation rather than estimated, breakout cables where a switch port feeds several adapters, the separate management network, and the port count kept in reserve for the next expansion.

Yes. We design non-blocking topologies that expand by adding leaf/spine capacity without redesign. The condition is that the target size is stated at the start, because the switch you choose sets the ceiling: the port count determines how many nodes fit in one tier, and crossing that line means adding a spine layer, more optics, and re-cabling work on a cluster that is by then in production. Telling us the two-year plan, not just the first purchase, is what makes the growth cheap.

More than it does on a general-purpose network. Ordinary data-center traffic is bursty and uncorrelated, so a 3:1 or 4:1 uplink ratio is normal and mostly invisible. Training traffic is the opposite: every node transmits at the same moment in the step, so a contended uplink is contended for all of them at once and shows up directly as a longer step time and idle GPUs. Non-blocking is the default we design toward for training fabrics, and where a ratio is accepted for budget reasons we say what it is and where it will be felt.

Enough that it belongs in the first budget rather than the last. Every link needs a transceiver at each end unless it is short enough for a direct-attach copper cable, and reach limits are what decide whether the switch can sit two racks away or has to sit in this one. Active optical and fiber runs cost more and take longer to source than copper. At cluster scale the optics count scales with ports rather than with nodes, which is why a fabric priced from switch list prices alone is always priced low.

Because the fabric decides the physical build. The number of adapters per GPU node sets the port count; the port count sets the switch and whether you need one tier or two; the switch position and cable reach set which nodes go in which rack; and the rack layout sets power and cooling per rack. Deciding the fabric after the nodes are racked means re-cabling, frequently re-racking, and a delay measured against a cluster that is already depreciating. It is the single most common way one of these projects goes over budget.