10Gig E: Hot Technology of 2009?
by Kyle FlahertyThis week I was catching up on many of the end-of-year prediction articles and "what to look for" in 2009 postings. Most of these lists are mundane and many of them don't go back and review their previous predictions to see how close they came in their prognosis. However, one list did catch my eye, Network World's "Nine Hot Technologies for '09" (nice work with the 9s folks). Number six was the one that stood out to me and we discussed it a bit on Twitter earlier in the week:
"With ongoing data-center server consolidation, not to mention the needs of service providers and high-volume Web sites, standards groups and vendors are hard at work on 40 Gigabit Ethernet and even 100 Gigabit Ethernet. For now, however, 10G Ethernet is the industry standard, and customers are flocking to 10G Ethernet switches. Switch-based 10G Ethernet port shipments grew by 140% in 2007, Infonetics Research reports. Worldwide revenue for 10G Ethernet services and equipment will hit nearly $9.5 billion by year-end, a 30% increase from last year, the firm predicts"
We wrote about this Infonetics research back in October when the report first came out. The market saw a large increase in switch-based 10G Ethernet port shipments in 2007 and, as Network World's Neil Weinberg writes, this was primarily due to per-port pricing dropping from $39K to $4K.
10G is definitely growing in the back room and Neil makes the point in the article that:
"If your Fast Ethernet boxes are becoming stressed, this might be the time to move to 10G Ethernet. Per-port prices are coming down and feature sets are going up."
I have not found comprehensive results from 2008 sales of 10G equipment (send along if you have a link), but I still have a few questions as we begin 2009:
- How much will the economy effect purchasing of this equipment? We might be surprised in that companies will move resources to the data center in order to purchase 'future-looking' equipment.
- When will we see the standards ironed out on 40G and/or 100G? This will obviously have an impact on the movement.
- When will chipsets for 10G decrease, making 10G to the desktop a bit more feasible? There was an obvious increase in 10G switch-based Ethernet shipments because of the decrease in per-port price, the same will go for desktop usage.
Obviously our eye is always on the testing of this type of equipment and the fact that you need testing tools that can not only realistically test performance and security, but reduce time-to-test. This is part of the conversation not typically discussed in most of these projections, particularly the latter point around reducing time-to-test. As I said in #1 above, we may see an increase in infrastructure in the data center, meaning that equipment manufacturers and service providers are going to want to deploy updated equipment and confirm that it is ready to perform in deployment (including 10 Gigabit Ethernet testing). In that spirit we are going to spend much of next week writing on reducing time-to-test, including seven tips we have to help in make this happen.
