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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.'"
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.