Excitement building around 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters

There has been a lot of activity surrounding 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters of late, as uses for such high-speed equipment continue to surface.

At last month's SC08 conference, Arista Networks demonstrated interoperability between its own 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and adapters from other vendors, including Chelsio Communications, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Myricom, Neterion, NetXen, and ServerEngines.

Obviously there are many different makers of 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, and it was interesting to see them come together like this. Arista was trying to give a sense of an "ecosystem" around 10 Gigabit Ethernet vendors. The company is now being headed by ex-Cisco exec Jayshree Ullal.

Also recently, 10 Gigabit silicon maker Solarflare Communications shipped its second-generation 10GBase-T PHY to switch and server manufacturers. This chip has a sub-4-watt low-power mode and supports Wake-on-LAN to save energy. Solarflare says server virtualization, high-performance computing, storage convergence and video on demand are driving the move to 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

Dell'Oro Group this week published a report that echoed the idea that the market for 10 Gigabit Ethernet network adapters is getting a boost from server virtualization. For example, the firm says Broadcom's silicon for 10 Gigabit Ethernet got a tremendous lift when it was used in HP's recently introduced ProLiant BL495c, which is a server blade intended for server virtualization.

Meanwhile, Intel has the top spot in revenue and NetXen has the top spot in port shipments. Dell'Oro only started following this market segment a few months ago.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.