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10GbE: What the Heck Took So Long?
storagedude writes "10 Gigabit Ethernet may finally be catching on, some six years later than many predicted. So why did it take so long? Henry Newman offers a few reasons: 10GbE and PCIe 2 were a very promising combination when they appeared in 2007, but the Great Recession hit soon after and IT departments were dumping hardware rather than buying more. The final missing piece is finally arriving: 10GbE support on motherboards. 'What 10 GbE needs to become a commodity is exactly what 1 GbE got and what Fibre Channel failed to get: support on every motherboard,' writes Newman. 'The current landscape looks promising. 10 GbE is starting to appear on motherboards from every major server vendor, and I suspect that in just a few years, we'll start to see it on home PC boards, with the price dropping from the double digits to single digits, and then even down to cents.'"
Biggest reason I can remember from when we were looking at upgrading SAN and LAN equipment in our data center was the price/performance point. We didn't need 10 GbE performance yet and the price was pretty far above what we were using. That was 3 years ago though, so I'd have to poke around some of the newer equipment to see if we have any boxes with it. I just took a gander through the HP and Dell offerings and it's not even an option on anything but the top tier equipment. I think that pretty much explains the situation itself.
You're looking at things backwards. If you've got a 500 MB/s SSD, then you shouldn't look at 10GigE and say "that's twice as fast as I need, it's useless". You should look at the existing GigE and say "my SSD is four times faster, one gigabit is too slow"...
Even a cheap commodity magnetic hard disk can saturate a gigabit network today. The fact that lots of computers use solid state drives only made that problem worse. Transferring files between computers on a typical home network these days, I think the one gigabit per second network limitation is going to be the bottleneck for many people.
Oh for crying out loud. Where do you people get off with this kind of thinking? How are you even allowed in technology fields with a mind like that?
It's not needed...technology is about advancing because it's WANTED. It's not run by committee, and it's not run by determination of some group need, because if it were, we'd still be living in caves and worshiping rocks, because fire isn't needed by anyone.
And the reason, reading between the lines, for it taking so long to be adopted, is because everyone has become cheapskates when it comes to technology. The idea of a separate NIC to handle network traffic is a lost cause, as is a dedicated sound card, and now video card. Why? Because you're trying to justify to a group of people who refuse to educate themselves why it would be in their own best interest to pay a little more.
I applaud the people behind 10GB E, and hope they have enough resources / energy to bang out 100GB E. This is progress we can measure, easily, and it should be rewarded.
I am John Hurt.
10GBe won't be as fast as a nice cheap SSD
It doesn't matter, remote storage is faster than gigabit. I don't need to hit 10 to get a benefit.
but not even an SSD can keep up with an avalanche of data requests from multiple systems unless that remote server is pretty damn beefy by home standards.
What? That's the whole point of fileservers. They need to meet the usage, of course, but that's an always increasing spec.
Simpler to keep your OS local, and trivial as far as cost.
Consolidating is always cheaper (per unit of storage) and it's easier to back up and manage, keep on UPS power, etc.
You'll need a heck of a RAID array for that, but it's buildable. Or, you could just stick with GigE, since that still tops out at 125MB/s and that pushes local (non-SSD) storage.
eh, my current central storage is 5 hard drives in a ZFS raidz2 with one SSD split up for L2ARC (cache) and ZIL (write cache). The entirely of the setup difficulty is:
cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget url-to-repo
yum install zfs
(reboot or modprobe)
zpool create home raidz2 sda sdb sdc sdd sde cache sdf6 log sdf7
Oh, I had to plug in 6 SATA cables. Typical throughput is about 340MB/s. The only reason they're not all SSD's is because SSD's are expensive and unreliable. If it wasn't a home machine, the ZIL would be on a mirror of SSD's.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that this requires a lot more than just a high-speed connection. High-end connection + craptastic router = terrible latency when dealing with high load.
Switch, not router. There are problems with current buffer management techniques that effectively means that higher ceiling room means latency improvements. Google 'bufferbloat'. Things like CoDel will make this better when the pipes are more full, but they're not widely deployed yet.
"I have my home wired up like a datacenter. Everyone else should want a huge amount of network capacity and capability so that it makes my already extravagant costs slightly cheaper."
JHFCOAS - this is Slashdot. What we're doing now is what will be sold in a box for $200 at WalMart in five years. I'm amazed to find tech geeks who don't even know that normal people have been buying inexpensive Buffalo and WD SAN solutions at the office supply store since 2008. And with all this shit going on about the NSA, you can bet people are going to be pulling some of their stuff back out of the cloud.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)