An excellent article available here. The author discusses 10 Gig Ethernet with competitive technologies such as iSCSI and Fiber Channel. The author argues that while the per port cost of 10 Gig Ethernet may be high, administration costs due to the ubiquity and ease of Ethernet technology will be much lower. The author expects costs of 10 Gig adapters to reach commodity price levels in another 3 years. One key area in which 10 Gig Ethernet has room for improvement is end-to-end latency, and reliable delivery of data.
Chelsio today announced the availability of its T3-based Unified Wire Accelerators, which enable server networking, storage networking and clustering on a single platform for the IBM BladeCenter enterprise servers. This card offloads TCP/IP, iSCSI and iWARP RDMA and consumes 16W, which is quite a good number for today’s high-speed adapters.
Woven Systems launched its EFX 1000 Ethernet Fabric Switch with 144 10-Gig Ethernet ports. Woven, a startup founded in 2003, received its Series A VC funding in 2005.
Woven says its primary goal has been to bring 10 Gig Ethernet closer to Infiniband in terms of latency and power consumption. Although Ethernet has the advantages of ubiquity, its power consumption is about 70 watts per port, much higher than Infiniband which is at few watts per port. Similarly, latencies at heavy load may be considerably higher than Infiniband.
The EFX 1000 uses about 16 watts per port and delivers an end-to-end latency of 4 microseconds. The switch also can dynamically load balance data traffic across the various 10 GbE paths. For this, it has its vSCALE packet processing ASIC which uses active congestion management to dynamically monitor congestion across a large fabric and steer traffic onto less congested alternate paths, without dropping or re-ordering packets.
It is evident that Woven Systems is targeting the convergence of wide-area network (WAN) and storage with 10 Gig Ethernet technology. Currently, fiber channel is usually used in Storage Area Networks, while Ethernet is used in WANs. The primary customers are expected to be high-performance computing communities such as national labs and web-server farms.
The product brief is available here.
In a latest research report, a cumulative total of nearly $64 billion will be spent on metro Ethernet equipment worldwide between 2006 and 2010. Worldwide metro Ethernet equipment manufacturer revenue jumped 83% in 2006, reaching just under $9.2 billion, and is projected to grow 73% to almost $16 billion by 2010.
According to a Infonetics Research report, PON sales grew to $965 million in 2006. The study also mentions that as expected, BPON sales are dropping while EPON and GPON sales are picking up. There is no winner between these two technologies yet, but an overall forecast of a $2.4 Billion PON market looks very promising to the EPON vendors.
In a very interesting development, Sun Microsystems today announced that Marvell will be licensing Sun’s 10 Gig Ethernet technology to build its own 10 Gig Ethernet cards. More importantly, this technology collaboration is expected to continue to further generations of Ethernet such as 100 Gig Ethernet.
This is a big win for Sun whose multi threaded networking technology employs multiple DMA channels to use multi-core processors that will dominate in the future. This also illustrates how Sun is trying to promote its technology to self-exist rather than limit it to its own products as has happened in the past. Sun’s 10 Gig cards were a late entry to the market compared to Chelsio and Neterion’s cards.
A detailed press release is available here.
hiamitabha
Petanets 