By Phil Hochmuth
Network World, 09/24/01
While vendors have been talking up prestandard 10G Ethernet products
since spring, experts say only the largest enterprises will be buying the
high-speed gear immediately. High prices, combined with limited demand
among enterprise users, will make 10G Ethernet a carrier technology for the
next few years.
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Most Gigabit Ethernet switch vendors have either announced their
10G Ethernet plans or hinted the technology is just around the corner for
their enterprise and carrier product lines. Avaya, Enterasys Networks, Foundry
Networks, Cisco, Nortel and Riverstone Networks have all announced 10G Ethernet products,
whether they be new stand-alone switches - such as Enterasys' Matrix E-1 or
Riverstone's RS16000 - or 10G modules for existing products.
Extreme Networks says it will not have a product until the standard
is complete sometime between March and June next year.
Service providers that sell optical Ethernet WAN and metropolitan-area
network (MAN) services (such as Yipes Communications and Telseon),
as well as traditional carriers trying to get into the MAN game,
are the ones chomping at the fiber bit to get ahold of these products.
Cisco, Extreme, Foundry and Nortel are betting heavily on 10G
Ethernet in that market, as is Riverstone, which sells only to
carriers.
As with most new technologies, early users will pay a premium.
"Right now, we're looking at a per-port cost of about $39,000,"
says Katrina Dahlquist, senior analyst with market research firm IDC.
With the average Gigabit Ethernet port price around $1,000, she
says, it will be more cost-effective for most companies to group up to eight
Gigabit links using the 802.3ad standard for link aggregation, which also
provides fault tolerance if links go down.
"We're really looking at the WAN as the best application
for 10 Gigabit, for connections between campus environments over several miles,"
Dahlquist says.
Still, vendors are covering all bases by making the
10G Ethernet case for the enterprise. Switch makers that focus
squarely on the enterprise, such as Avaya and Enterasys, are among
the companies leading the 10G Ethernet charge for long-range,
campus backbone connections.
Their pitches are not falling on deaf ears among users with massive
bandwidth requirements.
"I could use 10 Gigabit links today to connect our higher-density
wiring closets to the network backbone," says Mike Cranmer, assistant
vice president of technical operations at ING Variable Annuities in West Chester,
Pa.
Cranmer, who uses X-Pedition backbone switches from Enterasys,
says he isn't shopping for 10G Ethernet products yet, but has seen utilization
occasionally hit 80% on single Gigabit links from wiring closets to the backbone.
He pools multiple Gigabit links to get around the problem, but that chews
up Gigabit port real estate.
"A single 10 Gig uplink would give me the density and capacity
I need for the foreseeable future," he says.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory could use
10G Ethernet for intracampus connectivity, says Dave Wiltzius,
network division leader for the San Francisco-area lab, which
is run by the U.S. Energy Department and the University of California.
The lab uses eight Catalyst 6509 switches in eight different buildings
to connect PCs, servers and two IBM supercomputers over a Gigabit
Ethernet network.
For its backbone, the lab uses Cisco's proprietary Gigabit EtherChannel
technology to pool eight Gigabit links into one logical link. The lab installs
all its fiber to connect buildings that may be miles apart.
"Building to building, it cost us about $20,000 [to install]
about 24 fibers," Wiltzius says. As it looks to expand the fiber net
to additional sites throughout the Bay area, the lab will have 10G Ethernet
in mind. "With those costs, we can look at 10 Gig becoming cost-effective
by replacing 10 fiber pairs with one fiber pair."
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Questions to ask 10Gig vendors
Which is more cost-effective: eight Gigabit Ethernet ports trunked together or a single 10G Ethernet port?
How much space will 10G modules take up in your switch chassis?
Does swapping out 16 gigabit ports on a blade for a single- or dual-port 10G module make sense?
If your product is prestandard, what kind of upgrade will be required once the standard is set? Do you guarantee that you will meet the standard?
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There is a risk involved in terms of redundancy, he notes. If
that one fiber fails, there goes the entire backbone, whereas the virtual
trunk only loses 1G bit/sec of throughput if one or two fibers go dark.
Despite how it is used, there is no question that 10G Ethernet
is coming. Ratification of the standard is still on track for next spring,
says Johnathan Thatcher, chair of the IEEE 802.3ae task force, the primary
standards body that is shaping 10G Ethernet specifications.
He agrees that two factors will hinder 10G Ethernet adoption
in companies during the next 18 months: high price and relatively low demand.
"I don't believe there is the degree of latent demand with
enterprises for 10 Gigabit as much as there was a pent-up demand for Gigabit
Ethernet," Thatcher says.
Still, he sees 10G Ethernet adoption as inevitable as prices
drop and optical components become more available and proven.
"The per-port prices that are starting to come out [for
10G Ethernet] are nowhere near - and are probably an order of magnitude more
than - what they will be once components and subsystems are manufactured in
volume," he says.
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Related links:
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