Gnodal was a

computer networking A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections ar ...

company headquartered in

Bristol Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city i ...

, UK. The company designed and sold

network switch A network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, and, by the IEEE, MAC bridge) is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive and forward data to the destination device. A netw ...

es for

datacenter A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommuni ...

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multi ...

and

high-frequency trading High-frequency trading (HFT) is a type of algorithmic financial trading characterized by high speeds, high turnover rates, and high order-to-trade ratios that leverages high-frequency financial data and electronic trading tools. While there is no ...

environments. Gnodal's products were based on its own Peta ASIC, which was the basis of a family of 1RU and 2RU

10 Gigabit Ethernet 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE, 10GbE, or 10 GigE) is a group of computer networking technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of 10 gigabits per second. It was first defined by the IEEE 802.3ae-2002 standard. Unlike previous Et ...

low latency switches, including the GS7200 switch. Gnodal's products ran a

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

-based

network operating system A network operating system (NOS) is a specialized operating system for a network device such as a router, switch or firewall. Historically operating systems with networking capabilities were described as network operating systems, because they a ...

, GnoS OS), which was based on

Aricent Aricent was a global design and engineering services company. It was acquired by French-based company Altran in 2018 and renamed Altran North America in April 2019 and Altran Americas in early 2020. With Altran's acquisition by Capgemini, the ...

's ISS product.

Corporate history

Gnodal was founded in March 2007 by Fred Homewood, Tony Ford, Jon Beecroft, David Hewson and Ed Turner (all formerly of

Quadrics In mathematics, a quadric or quadric surface (quadric hypersurface in higher dimensions), is a generalization of conic sections ( ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas). It is a hypersurface (of dimension ''D'') in a -dimensional space, and it is d ...

), Matt Hatch joined the founding group in July 2007. The company was funded by this group until April 2008, then receiving £1.1m seed funding from

Adrian Beecroft Paul Adrian Barlow Beecroft (born Yorkshire, 20 May 1947) is a British venture capitalist based in London. He was for many years Chief Investment Officer of the private equity group Apax. He was until recently Chairman of Dawn Capital. Among t ...

(former

CIO CIO may refer to: Organizations * Central Imagery Office, a predecessor of the American National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency * Central Intelligence Office, the national intelligence agency of the former Republic of Vietnam * Central Intellige ...

Apax Partners Apax Partners LLP is a British private equity firm, headquartered in London, England. The company also operates out of six other offices in New York, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Tel Aviv, Munich and Shanghai. As of December 2017, the firm, including its ...

NESTA Nesta (formerly NESTA, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) is an innovation foundation based in the UK. The organisation acts through a combination of programmes, investment, policy and research, and the formation of part ...

, South West Ventures Fund and Finance South West Growth Fund (both managed at the time by YFM). Will Leonard (formerly at

Xyratex Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarte ...

) was appointed as a

non-executive director A non-executive director (abbreviated to non-exec, NED or NXD), independent director or external director is a member of the board of directors of a corporation, such as a company, cooperative or non-government organization, but not a member of ...

and chairman by the investors at this time. Dawn Capital (an

ECF ECF may refer to: Science, technology and medicine * East Coast fever or ''theileriosis'', a disease of cattle in Africa * Electrochemical fluorination * Elemental chlorine free, a form of paper bleaching * Enterocutaneous fistula * Evolving ...

) joined the other funds in an

A round A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes'' ...

of unspecified size completed in July 2009. On 1 September 2010, Eddie Minshull joined the company as chairman, replacing Will Leonard. At the time Minshull was also

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especiall ...

of MLLTelecom and was formerly EVP of Worldwide Field Operations for

Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including routers, switches, network management software, network security products, ...

. In 2011, Gnodal launched its first products at

Interop Interop is an annual information technology conference organised by Informa PLC. It takes place in the US and Tokyo (Japan) each year. 2016 marked Interop's (US) 30th anniversary and throughout that time, Interop has promoted interoperability and ...

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, May 2011. Also in 2011, Mike Cartwright joined the company as

CFO The chief financial officer (CFO) is an officer of a company or organization that is assigned the primary responsibility for managing the company's finances, including financial planning, management of financial risks, record-keeping, and financi ...

. In March 2012, Bob Fernander joined the company, replacing Fred Homewood as

. Fred took the role of full-time CTO after Bob's appointment. At the Interop trade show in May 2012 Gnodal won Best of Interop, for networking with its 72 port 40GbE switch in

. At 2RU for 72x 40GbE ports, this switch was the most dense at the time. In March 2013, Beb Fernander left Gnodal and Eddie Minshull was appointed

Executive Chairman The chairperson, also chairman, chairwoman or chair, is the presiding officer of an organized group such as a board, committee, or deliberative assembly. The person holding the office, who is typically elected or appointed by members of the group ...

, in a significant reorganisation that included a major reduction in staffing levels. Unconfirmed rumours indicated that Fernander had failed to close a required funding round. In May 2013 Gnodal announced a 36 port 40GbE switch, the GS0036 at Interop in Las Vegas. On 4 October 2013 Gnodal Limited, the UK operating company, went into

Administration Administration may refer to: Management of organizations * Management, the act of directing people towards accomplishing a goal ** Administrative Assistant, traditionally known as a Secretary, or also known as an administrative officer, administ ...

with BDO being appointed as the Administrator. On 1 November 2013

Cray Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed i ...

announced the acquisition of the Gnodal

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

and team in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located enti ...

, with Gnodal ceasing trading as a result. All the remaining founders, Jon Beecroft, Tony Ford, David Hewson, Fred Homewood, Ed Turner and employees joined Cray on that date.

Technology

Low Latency ASIC

Gnodal's technology was implemented in their own low latency ASIC and customised software stack. This used a number of techniques (patented and commercial secret) to implement a multi-path Ethernet switching system based on multiple, co-operating ASICs without loops, delivering low end-to-end latency with intra packet load balancing delivered over in-band connections.

Products

Ethernet switches

Gnodal's product line could be separated into two groups: # Top of Rack: Included GS7200 and GS4008, allowed standard based connectivity to servers and devices via standard 10GbE SFP+ optics or 40GbE

QSFP Small Form-factor Pluggable connected to a pair of fiber-optic cables Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) is a compact, hot-pluggable network interface module format used for both telecommunication and data communications applications. An SFP ...

connections # Fabric: GS0018 full line-rate 18 port 40Gb top-of-rack fabric switch, with

Links in 1RU. GS0036, full line rate 36 port 40Gb top-of-rack fabric switch, with 36

links in 1RU. GS0072, full line rate 72 port 40Gb top-of-rack fabric switch, with 72

links in 2RU.

Major competitors

Brocade Communications Systems Brocade is an American technology company specializing in storage networking products, now a subsidiary of Broadcom Inc. The company is known for its Fibre Channel storage networking products and technology. Prior to the acquisition, the comp ...

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

(following acquisition of

Force10 Dell Force10 (formerly nCore Networks, Force10 Networks), was a United States company that developed and marketed 10 Gigabit and 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches for computer networking to corporate, educational, and governmental customers. It had ...

) #

Extreme Networks Extreme Networks is an American networking company based in San Jose, California. Extreme Networks designs, develops, and manufactures wired and wireless network infrastructure equipment and develops the software for network management, policy, a ...

Arista Networks Arista Networks (formerly Arastra) is an American computer networking company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking (SDN) for large datacenter ...

Avaya Avaya Holdings Corp., often shortened to Avaya (), is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, that provides cloud communications and workstream collaboration services. The company's platform inc ...

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official website
Networking hardware companies British companies established in 2007