10Gb Ethernet Alliance is Formed

Lucas123 writes "Nine storage and networking vendors have created a consortium to promote the use of 10GbE. The group views it as the future of a combined LAN/SAN infrastructure. They highlight the spec's ability to pool and virtualize server I/O, storage and network resources and to manage them together to reduce complexity. By combining block and file storage on one network, they say, you can cut costs by 50% and simplify IT administration. 'Compared to 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel, a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet-based storage infrastructure can cut storage network costs by 30% to 75% and increases bandwidth by 2.5 times.'"

Comments

Math on /.

[Idiomatick]

i'm worried they had to say 4 * 2.5 = 10 on /.

Fibre only?

[masonc]

From their white paper,
"The draft standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet is significantly different in some respects from earlier Ethernet standards, primarily
in that it will only function over optical fiber, and only operate in full-duplex mode"

There are vendors, such as Tyco Electronic's AMP NetConnect line, that have 10G over copper. Has this been discarded in the standard revision?

Re:Fibre only?

[Belial6]

Unfortunately, you made a fundamental, but common mistake. You cannot future proof your home by running any kind of cable. You should have run conduit. That is the only way to future proof a home for data. When I renovated my last home, I ran conduit to every room. It was pretty cool in that I didn't run any data cables at all until the house was finished. When The house was done, I just pulled the phone, coax and Ethernet lines to the rooms I wanted. If and when fiber, or a higher quality copper is needed, it i will just be a matter of taping the new cable to the end of the old, and pulling it through.

bandwidth = performance ?

[magarity]

So how will tcpip networking over this speed measure up to dedicated storage devices like SAN over fibre channel? I have to suspect not; existing iSCSI over 1GB tcpip is a lot less than 1/4 of 4GB fibre to a decent SAN. Sigh, I'm afraid even more of my databases will get hooked up to cheap iSCSI over this instead of SANs space that costs more dollars per capacity but delivers the speed when needed :( Reports coming up fast enough? Remember the planning phase when the iSCSI sales rep promised better performance per $ than SAN? It wasn't better overall performance, just better per $. There's a BIG difference.

Re:Block storage?

[spun]

SAN is block storage, NAS is file storage. Simply put, if you send packets requesting blocks of data, like you would send over your local bus to your local hard drive, it is block storage. If you send packets requesting whole files, it is file storage.