Surf's up

This year, expect a plethora of cost-effective, 10Gbps Ethernet-based server platforms to come to market. Initially presented as a backbone technology, for many years there was little indication that 10Gbps Ethernet would be expanded to the desktop or to server connectivity in data centres.

It offers a more efficient and less expensive approach to moving data around the network.

Andy Robb is chief technology officer of Duxbury Networking.

This sentiment seemed to be endorsed when the advent of blade servers four years ago pushed many pundits to suggest their fast processing capabilities, as well as the large bandwidth facilities - when linked and aggregated - would negate any need to shift to '10-Gig' Ethernet anytime soon.

However, the fast rate of adoption of technology in the backbone, together with a number of performance increases on the server front, have driven the need for a low cost 10GBASE-T (10Gbps Ethernet running over balanced twisted pair copper cabling) interface, which is embedded on the motherboard.

As a result, 10Gbps Ethernet is set to become another 'disruptive' technology, because it offers a more efficient and less expensive approach to moving data around the network, as well as providing significant processing improvements for the enterprise.

By having this technology advantage in blade enclosures as well as making it available for traditional rack-mounted or desktop servers, there will be an immediate change to the switching architecture requirements.

Not only are enterprises going to need direct front-panel connectivity for 10-Gig servers, but there will be design challenges related to propagating these improvements around the network to take advantage of 10GBASE-T's ability to provide a consistent technology end-to-end.

Network managers will have to look at the possibility of having multiple 10-Gig uplinks to the network, rather than just one, to deliver the speed and other improvement benefits to end-users.

In addition, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology - involving the practice of hosting a desktop operating system within a virtual machine running on a centralised server - will drive the requirement for huge data 'pipes' to the server infrastructure where there are literally hundreds of thousands of potential desktops that could be accommodated.

To be efficient and fast, virtual infrastructures must optimise underlying resource use or the platforms can slow to a crawl. This puts an even greater performance requirement on corporate network infrastructures to accommodate the direct connectivity requirements between the server network, the storage area network and the backbone network architecture.

In this light, 10GBASE-T will become a catalyst for organisations to upgrade their network switches. It will join previous technologies in motivating a significant 'shift' in thinking and network architecture design.

In the early days, the shifts centred on changes in protocols and features, for example, FDDI to Ethernet or ATM to Ethernet, or they focused on multiplexing different types of technologies. Network managers were faced with the adoption of routing, accommodating multiple VLANs and employing technologies that could start prioritising various activities.

However, once Ethernet and the Internet Protocol (IP) became standardised, the new adoptions became increasingly based on more practical requirements, such as the arrival of power over Ethernet to boost IP telephony and power multiple devices on the network.

Practical change to accommodate the increased processing power on the server infrastructure will characterise network switch purchasing trends in 2012 and in the near future.

This will be a boost for the IT industry as well as end-users who should be thrilled at the prospect of faster networks with greater bandwidth between network core and servers, and - perhaps surprisingly - lower costs in the long-term as less budget will have to be spent on increasing processing power to the desktop.

A great example of the benefits of the 10GBASE-T shift and the adoption of VDI will be the proliferation of BYOD (bring your own devices) such as smartphones, iPads and Android tablets, all connected to the corporate network by WiFi (an infrastructure that's already paid for in most companies). The mobility benefits are obvious.