It's been a long time. No, I'm not talking about my writing, but rather the wait for 10Gig to get to that magic "10X the bandwidth for 3X the price" that everyone talks about. It's finally here and we're seeing end-user adoption. See
http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management/10gige-tipping-point-reached---problems-remain.phpfor an end-user's description of the compelling 10Gig upgrade. Funny as it is, it seems at least this one blogger is not focused on new protocols or new paradigms of wiring datacenters, but rather simply getting more bandwidth over plain old ethernet. Sometimes those of us close to the technology get enchanted by the new stuff, and we need a user to ground us in the important things. Now that the tipping point is reached, that is going to be happening more and more. New storage licenses for FCoE or special wiring for SFP+ still get in the way, but more on that later.
It seems he's waiting for the 10GBASE-T value proposition to solve some of the mass-adoption issues, but that's right around the corner:
"Someday soon 10gigE will be as simple as 1gig with 10GBASE-T competing with SFP+ passive cables for short haul and SFP+ optics for long. 10GBASE-T uses familiar, if higher quality, cables and allows for 100/1000/10G trispeed ports, but today's 10GBASE-T solutions use 5W or more per port and cost a bit more than SFP+ cables." - I suspect the power and cost comparisons come straight from the SFP+ salesment - they're not from box-level products, where the difference isn't material, and the costs he quotes on cabling are greater than anything coming from 10GBASE-T.
Expect a lot 10GBASE-T switch and NIC announcements in the coming year, and a lot of interesting action...