[accountatwork]

Solarflare isn't the only option for OS bypass. In fact, no major cloud vendor uses Solarflare NICs even for applications where OS bypass is critical because Solarflare is way too expensive for what you get (the retail price is substantially higher than Mellanox, Annapurna back when you could buy those publicly, etc., without discounts, and the volume discount you get with other vendors is more than an order of magnitude larger than the discount Solarflare will give you).

The advantage of Solarflare is that it's easy to use, but at the scale large cloud vendors operate at (millions of machines), it's much cheaper to just have a networking staff that can properly operate another vendor's NICs.

[brianwawok]

It was kind of a rhetorical question... because if you actually care about latency, you do not use windows nor use the public cloud.

I saw a few hundred Solarflare cards purchased, the prices were not that absurd. Only 10-20% of the total cost of the server, for a pretty amazing perf gain. Mellanox etc. tested similar but had less helpful sales engineers IIRC.

[accountatwork]

Sure, you won't get much of a discount from anyone for quantities of a few hundred. You might be looking at a 2x price difference, which is pocket change for a few hundred machines. In quantities of hundreds of thousands or millions, the price difference is well over an order of magnitude because Solarflare won't play ball the same way other vendors will.

That adds up to a significant number, even if it's "only" 10%-20% per server, and you're probably overestimating the cost of the rest of the server since large companies are able to get steep discounts on almost everything in the quantities they buy in.

> Mellanox etc. tested similar but had less helpful sales engineers

We've found Mellanox engineers to be more helpful than Solarflare folks. I don't think that's because one company has inherently more helpful engineers. We're just not in a market that Solarflare cares about and you're not in a market that Mellanox cares about.

> if you actually care about latency, you do not use windows nor use the public cloud

You might be surprised by how many HPC shops have moved from fancy in-house infiniband networks and custom fabric to cloud hosted HPC clusters. HFT isn't moving to the public cloud anytime soon, but a number of large customers who care about sub-microsecond network latency have found real value in moving to the public cloud.

[brianwawok]

> In quantities of hundreds of thousands or millions

Sorry, I do not know anyone who buys millions of high performance NIC cards. Maybe 1 or 2 supercomputer labs in the world? And with that in mind, I am not sure the price break a company will provide to someone buying a million $500 network cards is super important to me?

> That adds up to a significant number, even if it's "only" 10%-20% per server, and you're probably overestimating the cost of the rest of the server since large companies are able to get steep discounts on almost everything in the quantities they buy in.

Nope, I definitely knew what the whole server cost.

[accountatwork]

So you're saying that you don't know anyone who buys in the quantities that we do, but definitely know what we pay?

I think you're responding to something that's not what I'm saying here. I never claimed that our pricing is relevant to you. Just that your pricing isn't relevant to us and that you're making generalizations that aren't valid outside of your niche.