10GBASE-T Comes to the Fore

Sometimes I look back and find it’s amazing how constant the demand for the simplicity and utility of 10GBASE-T has been over the past 7 years since Solarflare began.  Never is it more apparent than in the responses to the launch of our recent single-chip, sub-6 watt transceiver.  It’s easy to say that it’s just history repeating itself, but a lot of hard work went into it.  10GBASE-T is about engineers putting the complexity into the silicon and firmware so that the user doesn’t have to.  Users have realized, and said to me, since 2000, that if they had a 10 Gigabit solution that ran on UTP copper (100 meters), they would adopt it, just as they had 1000BASE-T.  Today, the response is the same.  Speaking the Rick Merritt in EE Times (4/14), Dante Malagrino, director of product marketing for data center solutions at Nuova Systems, which was acquired last week by Cisco, said that “the 10GBASE-T technology "is great in terms of compatibility and simplicity,”.  Cisco has understood the importance of this technology since the beginning, it was their help in driving the 802.3an (10GBASE-T) standard, particularly on issues of power/performance tradeoffs and latency, that have resulted in the available parts today.   Recognizing, as Steve Pope has, that latency is mostly in the system, and that the PHY contributes little, Cisco helped set the 2.5usec latency that is standard for 10GBASE-T (http://www.ieee802.org/3/an/public/jul05/comments_3_0705.pdf ).

The question marks for 10GBASE-T have always been around 3 things: (1) can it be done, which was proven with the SFX7101, shipping since August 2006, (2), will the power come down (with the SFT9001 it has, dramatically), and (3) is there really demand for 10 gigabit. If you’re reading this blog, you are likely already aware that 10gigabit technology is (finally) beginning to take off in the market, and that it is driven by a variety of applications, including storage, unified fabrics, and virtualization.  These in turn, are not simply ends in themselves, but are driven by operational and energy efficiencies, major economic factors that are becoming increasingly important in today’s economy.  In relation to 10 gigabit networking, Renato Recio, a chief engineer for server networking at IBM Corp. said to EE Times (http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207200193), "Somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies are going to be building data centers in the next three years," "They are looking for technologies to make them more green, and this network convergence group has that value--this rings for customers”.

Rick Merritt, writing for EE Times, understands the operational importance of 10GBASE-T to network convergence, when he writes, “The work on the 10GBASE-T standard for Ethernet over copper lines only indirectly fuels the network convergence. Its primary aim is to lower the cost of and expand the market for 10-Gbit Ethernet, which has been limited to expensive optical and short-reach copper cables to date.”  Lower cost is extremely important, because customers will only buy these more efficient technologies at a reasonable price, and that is where the new generation of 10GBASE-T transceivers comes in. The fully-integrated SFT9001 now brings the promise of low-cost 10 Gigabit Ethernet to fruition. Again from EE Times, Recio added, "In my opinion, 10GBASE-T is a very important piece because it significantly reduces my price point to use copper," "I'd rather not use fiber in a rack, and it's an even better deal if my end-of-row switch can use copper."

These new parts will take some months for OEMs to integrate into end-user products, and, expect to see a lot of conversation in the meantime, touting the benefits of optics or short-reach copper solutions.  Having watched the constancy of the 10GBASE-T market demand for a number of years, it looks like the promise has finally be prepared and the tidal wave of 10 Gigabit copper is coming.