Discussion on:

Will 2010 see 10 Gigabit Ethernet go mainstream?

I think the answer to the article title, however will be no.

While more servers and switches are coming out that support 10 Gig as an option, I don't think there will be much traction for this for the vast majority of server farm providers until the convergence cost is lower than the purchase price of the separate hardware.

It's not just the hard costs either. Data Centers I am familiar with are not staffed to handle a converged network.

Just saying until the same pressures that drove us to 1 Gig and virtualization apply to the 10 G environments, we will not see it take hold in the mainstream.

...I hope that the internet backbone grows in bandwidth.

It's already bad enough that ISPs are too cheap to widen their bandwidth and now charge you the same for throttled service as they did 5 years ago for unlimited service.

I think sooner or later 10GE will become the standard. Whether you look at it has a natural course in technology life, or the need for higher capacity for higher data transfer, you will come to the same conclusion. Within the next year or two, once the Virtualization topic becomes more and more defined, companies will start implementing 10GE as the standard to go along with virtualization. The higher demand for faster and larger data transfer, the greater the demand for a technology to support it.

The problem as you scale up wire speeds is end-end latency. Gigabit Ethernet still has a long ways to go to catch up with Infiniband. Cost per port is still falling for IB. It still makes sense to me that IB takes over the internal core as the unified data/storage fabric with those good ole' Gigabit Ethernet switches pushed to the edge as Internet connections.

We are in the process of upgrading to 10GigE for all of our VM environments. We have also ditched iSCSI and use NFS over 10 GigE. This mixed with jumbo frames has gained us significant performance gains. TCO of FCoE and CNA's is still quite high imo (especially for smaller shops/networks). It still beats out traditional Fiber as well. Id expect to see it become the standard in the next few years. As that happens, of course, price will go down even more which will expedite adoption.

Anybody remember (mores) moor's law?

The faster it goes the faster it will go... realistically its just a matter of time... who will ever need a faster than a 386 cpu was a catch fraze from that era - (beep...error).. it will happen its just a matter of time...like so many things in this world...

L8r