10Gb Ethernet Alliance is Formed

Lucas123 writes "Nine storage and networking vendors have created a consortium to promote the use of 10GbE. The group views it as the future of a combined LAN/SAN infrastructure. They highlight the spec's ability to pool and virtualize server I/O, storage and network resources and to manage them together to reduce complexity. By combining block and file storage on one network, they say, you can cut costs by 50% and simplify IT administration. 'Compared to 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel, a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet-based storage infrastructure can cut storage network costs by 30% to 75% and increases bandwidth by 2.5 times.'"

Misleading Title.

[Anonymous Coward]

The 10GEA [wikipedia.org] is not the same as the storage alliance mentioned in TFA.

Re:How about hard drive speeds

[cshake]

That seems to be the idea behind this spec - a network interface that is as fast as a drive interface on a local machine, which would allow for nearly transparent remote drives, or even striped and mirrored raid across multiple machines to make it really fast. It really would be nice to see that.

Re:Awesome!

[moderatorrater]

You're not using your home network like you should be then. I often find myself transferring multiple gigabytes of information from one computer to another.

Re:Fibre only?

[Belial6]

Unfortunately, you made a fundamental, but common mistake. You cannot future proof your home by running any kind of cable. You should have run conduit. That is the only way to future proof a home for data. When I renovated my last home, I ran conduit to every room. It was pretty cool in that I didn't run any data cables at all until the house was finished. When The house was done, I just pulled the phone, coax and Ethernet lines to the rooms I wanted. If and when fiber, or a higher quality copper is needed, it i will just be a matter of taping the new cable to the end of the old, and pulling it through.

Re:Awesome!

[calebt3]

Why not?

Re:Math on /.

[Shakrai]

It can only get 80% saturation

Do you have a citation for that? I've seen Ethernet networks with decent switches approach 95% of the rated capacity.

Re:SCI, Infiniband

[afidel]

There are literally several orders of magnitude more ports of ethernet sold per year than fiberchannel and there are about an order of magnitude more fiberchannel than infiniband. Most of the speakers at storage networking world last week think that it's inevitable that ethernet will take over storage, the ability to spread R&D out over that many ports is just too great of an advantage for it not to win in the long run.

Re:bandwidth = performance ?

[gwk]

Your right iscsi does perform acceptably for a lot of uses but I feel I should point out that your results probably are a reflection of linux cacheing and read ahead performance, most gig-e gear now seems to do wire speed which is great but gig-e might not cut it. FC still provides considerably more bandwidth and lower latency. 10GBe will improve that but I read a benchmark of 10GBe HBAs (which I apologize but I can't find) that showed the maximum performance that could be got out of the operating system and HBA at 2.5Gb/s which is no where near advertised and lower than FC. Too me this isn't really surprising TCP/IP imposes quite a bit of overhead e.g. run bonnie++ on an NFS share over IB without any of the cute RDMA stuff and watch the machine spend 30% of its time in kernel.