Finally Time for 10 Gig
With less than a week before the big show, Jon Oltsik of ESG today offered his thoughts in CNet on the Top 5 Things on Tap at Interop. He discussed obvious trends of IT going green and virtualization, but I found his thoughts on 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10 Gb) most interesting.
10-Gigabit Ethernet. Yes, we’ve been talking about this for years but the discussion will shift this year from the network core to data center switching. Good for vendors like Extreme, Force 10, and Foundry. This also could help Juniper Networks and its new line of Ethernet switches.
From everything I’m hearing either from our engineers or the recent study we did involving nearly 600 network professionals, we’re at the beginning of a very steady move to 10 Gb with nearly one-quarter of businesses worldwide implementing 10 Gb by the end of 2008. 13% of global organizations have deployed 10 Gb networks, while another 11 percent expect to roll out 10 Gb in the next 12 months (Source).
Charles Thompson, our manager of systems engineering, discussed 10 Gb adoption rates last week with Jason Bovberg of Windows IT Pro.
“I was surprised by the relatively high percentage of 10GbE adoption rates. Network engineers are trying to migrate away from two switches designed to communicate over multi-connection 1Gb link (so they would bond together two or three 1Gb pipes into an Etherchannel) and upgrade that connection. So it’s really the connections between switches that 10GbE is being rolled out to. I’m not seeing a lot of 10GbE to the server or desktop. It’s mostly switch-to-switch communication.”
He has also mentioned the decreasing costs of 10 Gb as another reason for its growing adoption:
“Thompson noted that the adoption rate for 10 Gb networks is ’still a strong number, in part because costs are declining.’ He cited the lower costs of interfaces for servers as an example. ‘In fact, many shops are replacing Fibre Channel with NAS using 10 Gb to take advantage of the lower costs,’ he added.”
