10-Gigabit Ethernet: Is this the standard for you?

In this electronic world, where bigger is better and nothing ever happens fast enough, 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) connectivity is the new king of the data throughput road. Replacing its little brother, Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE), 10GbE supports throughput up to 10x the throughput of 1GbE. It’s like replacing your garden hose with a fire hose to transmit your electronic bits across the network.

There are several 10GbE standards in place, with IEEE Standard 802.3-2008 being a consolidation of all the standards and amendments currently in place. That means that manufacturers develop products to a common standard, and you don’t have to worry as much about proprietary implementations.

That being the case, it just makes sense to use 10GbE connections as the backbone of your network, especially when connecting segments of your network with many devices that need significant available bandwidth.

This is becoming more important now that 1GbE to the desktop is becoming the norm, rather than the exception. If you have a wiring closet with 96 ports of 1GbE connections, you must be able to support required bandwidth back to the core. There aren’t many situations in which your workstations will use the entire 1GbE connection, but as applications become more bandwidth-intensive, and multimedia more mainstream, bandwidth requirements will increase and the backbone infrastructure must keep up to avoid bottlenecking.

Another situation in which 10GbE makes sense is when you have your WAN layout in a star topology, with the datacenter in the middle.

In star topology, each remote site connects directly to a center location; drawn on paper, it looks like a star. When remote locations are connected over fiber, using 10GbE on the backbone just makes sense. In fact, for larger locations, you can bond connections to support 20GbE, 40GbE and larger connections, if the remote location has a significant number of devices to support.

Finally, with virtualization being so popular, and blade server implementations being a cost-effective way to support a large number of host servers, 10GbE from the blade center to the core also makes sense. Many of these virtual environments are supporting 100+ servers on a single blade chassis. In this case, 10GbE links, bonded together to provide even greater throughput, can avert bottlenecking.

Now you’re probably wondering, “Gosh, why hasn’t everyone already moved to this?”

As with any exotic, high-performance machine, 10GbE is not cheap. 10GbE implementations are a sizable investment, and should only be undertaken where the increased performance offsets costs.

The good news, as always with developing technology, is that 10GbE is becoming more accessible to the masses. When 1GbE was first introduced, it too provided a 10x improvement in performance, but at high cost.

But it’s now the de facto standard for basic implementations.