The continued adoption of virtualization and cloud computing is pushing the widespread adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, according to
Solarflare Communications, leading provider of standards-compliant 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) silicon. The company’s two CTOs,
George Zimmerman and
Steve Pope, share their predictions on technology trends in 2009, staking a claim that big data center players and Asian manufacturers will hold a strong role in bringing to market 10GbE products. An increased focus on energy efficiency and cost savings will also play a role in the implementation of 10GBASE-T. Specifically, Zimmerman and Pope see:
1. CIOs will respond to the economic downturn by focusing core spending on mature and proven technology, which will support measureable improvements in areas of application performance and convergence, and enable increasing levels of virtual business activities. Investment in new multi-core CPUs and server virtualization will be increasingly leveraged through the deployment of low cost iSCSI storage. This trend, along with continued adoption of cloud computing and Web 2.0 applications, will drive demand for 10GbE. Enterprises and data centers are looking for cost-effective ways to upgrade their infrastructure to handle these advanced applications, while utilizing existing infrastructure. By mid-2009, there will be several 10GBASE-T switch and server adapter products on the market that will enable incremental bandwidth upgrades using 10GbE over installed copper cabling.
2. The Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) in Asia played largely a silent role in the growth of the enterprise and data center network industry in 2008. This will change due to increasing globalization and outsourcing. Given the economic climate, it is likely the percentage of switch, server and server adapter products being designed, engineered and manufactured in Taiwan and China will increase.
3. As energy efficiency continues to be top-of-mind, standards initiatives, such as the IEEE P802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet, will introduce ways to map power consumption to usage and network loads. Additional power savings modes will be incorporated at both the component level and in end-user products. The IEEE P802.3az task force is on target to ratify requirements in the second half of 2010, shaping the way components operate and are designed.
4. Current blade architectures, while driving some cost and efficiency savings, will be taken to new levels of compute density and power efficiency through continued integration and the continued removal of legacy subsystems from the platform architecture. With the introduction of Nehalem, all major CPU vendors have now firmly adopted integrated memory controllers with a multi-core NUMA architecture. In the future, look to CPU real-estate being dedicated to application-specific functions and other techniques, such as individual core power scaling, being adopted and integrated into operating systems. Data centers that have already moved to a tiered storage architecture such as iSCSI, may see the opportunity of further reducing energy consumption and increasing compute density by entirely removing rotating media from all other compute tiers as the cost of solid state storage continues to fall.
“Large, tier-one OEMs and ODMs are making a push toward creating a new data center infrastructure vision and we will see this come to fruition in 2009,” said Pope. “Some players will bypass traditional server customers to sell servers directly through leading data center players. Other will look to form Ethernet partner / channel deals.”
“By the end of 2009, more than 50% of new data centers will have Category 6A or better cabling installed,” said Zimmerman. “This signals to OEMs and ODMs that their customers are ready for mainstream 10GBASE-T, as the most cost-effective, high-performance networking solution needed in today’s enterprise. While we may see conversations hedging toward 40GbE and 100GbE around the end of the year, 10GbE is ready now and poised for volume adoption.”
For more information on Solarflare, or to read Pope and Zimmerman’s blog, Up and Down the Network Stack, please visit www.solarflare.com and http://10gigabitethernet.typepad.com.