For a decade, network analysts have touted 10Gb Ethernet as the next step in internal network technology. But until now various factors including the cost, the added complexity and need to retrain network personnel, and simply a lack of perceived need have confined 10Gb to SANs and other niches where pure network speed ruled. For most of that time CPU power rather than network speed was the gating factor in server performance.

Now, says McLeod Glass, director of marketing for industry standard servers & software at HP and Greg Scherer, VP of storage & strategy at Broadcom, 10GbE’s time may finally have come, driven by several technical and business issues.

First, they told an audience of Wikibon.org community members at a Peer Incite meeting on March 20, the steady increase in CPU power, and in particular the advent of the new Xeon E5 2600 family of processors,  combined with multicore architectures, has made the 1GbE networks common in data centers the gating factor in overall performance. Second, virtualization has created a much more complex performance environment on servers, with multiple applications in virtual machines (VMs) competing for the limited bandwidth on the network to access the data they need.

The common approach to solving this problem is to plug multiple 1GbE cables into a server. Particularly in blade environments this creates a very complex and inflexible physical environment. By comparison a single 10GbE connection can be partitioned into multiple 1GbE channels to serve multiple VMs simultaneously with the flexibility to shift idle bandwidth to VMs that need more at a given moment. And it greatly simplifies the physical environment, which demands a great deal of manual attention to maintain and is not amenable to automation, thereby saving operating costs.

Meanwhile 10GbE also improves performance of large, usually unvirtualized, mission-critical applications such as Oracle that are often network-bound on 1GbE infrastructures. This issue is only likely to intensify as more companies adopt predictive analytics based on big data platforms such as Hadoop that demand very fast acquisition of large volumes of data, typically from the Internet.

And, said Glass, new management technologies such as the network management that HP has built into its latest generation Xeon servers in close partnership with Broadcom, allows users to implement 10GbE initially without the associated management complexity by allowing managers to shut off the extra options built into the 10GbE standard. And HP’s 10BaseT connectivity system allows users to choose between 1 GbE and 10 GbE on a server-by-server basis and to upgrade in the field.

hat is the good news. The bad news is that at this time all this technology is available only for blade servers. Over time, Glass said, HP plans to bring at least some of it to tower and rack servers, but it is not available there yet. Also, 10 GbE only benefits application environments that put heavy demand on the network. Applications that do not have heavy IO loads will not see an appreciable speed increase. Also, moving to 10GbE does usually mean upgrading much of the physical network, including replacing copper cable with fiber and changing switches, so this does have a significant up-front expense. And ultimately organizations that move to 10GbE will want to implement the extra management capabilities, which will require investment in retraining network management staff.

Wikibon’s recommendation is that organizations with little experience in 10GbE should invest in a test-bed installation to start gaining understanding of both the complexities and potential applications of the technology in their environments. Clearly, says Wikibon CTO David Floyer, 10GbE is the future for many environments, and it is time for them to start preparing for that future, which is fast becoming reality.