10G Ethernet (10GbE)

10G Ethernet Overview

Ethernet is an industry standard for a packet-based computer networking technology for LANs that has become the foundation for most wired communications technology. It has been around for over three decades and the technology has continually evolved, keeping pace with just about every application trend and technology breakthrough on the Internet. It has become the choice for wiring homes and enterprises around the world. Today more than 85 percent of all installed network connections and more than 95 percent of all LANs are Ethernet-based. Nearly all traffic on the Internet starts or ends on an Ethernet connection.

From its inception, 10G Ethernet was intended to retain backward compatibility and full interoperability with 10/100/1000M bit per second (bps) Ethernet while adding a tenfold increase in performance. Ethernet and IP bandwidth can now be scaled from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps today (40Gbps & 100Gbps in the future) – a ratio of 1 to 1000 — without compromising intelligent network services such as Layer 3 routing and layer 4 to layer 7 intelligence, including quality of service (QoS), class of service (CoS), caching, server load balancing, security, and policy based networking capabilities. Due to the uniform nature of Ethernet across all environments, these services can be delivered at line rates over the network and supported over all network physical infrastructures in the local area network (LAN), metropolitan area network (MAN), and wide area network (WAN). 10G Ethernet allows the convergence of services across networking, storage and high performance computing (HPC) networks in the data centre as well as voice, data and video networks outside the data centre.

Growing Market Opportunity

The need to converge networking, storage and HPC in the data center and the relentless rapid growth in IP traffic and its popularity for carrying voice, data and video continue to drive the demand for greater network bandwidth. The need for high performing converged networks has driven a market that will become a $2B total addressable market (TAM) in 2010.

Reports from analysts have said that the overall Ethernet switch market is getting hit hard by the recession, but that the sales mix is shifting more toward the higher-priced 10GbE products, which will be the only segment of the market that sees growth in 2009. They also project combined, worldwide sales of 10G, 40G, and 100G ports on networking equipment will be strong over the next 5 years, with enterprises and service providers expected to spend an accumulative $105 billion between 2008 and 2013.

Convergence of network technologies has been something IT managers have required since the emergence of the data centre. The benefits gained from having one infrastructure for data networking, storage networking and inter-processing communications provide improved Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This is due to being able to use common hardware for multiple network traffic types and reducing costs associated with managing different tools and systems for separate networks.

The adoption of 10GbE into mainstream data centres now makes it possible for Ethernet to match the raw performance required for today’s storage technologies, Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI. This is what has lead to the emergence of FCoE and the Converged Network Adapter (CNA).