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.'"

Fibre only?

[masonc]

From their white paper,
"The draft standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet is significantly different in some respects from earlier Ethernet standards, primarily
in that it will only function over optical fiber, and only operate in full-duplex mode"

There are vendors, such as Tyco Electronic's AMP NetConnect line, that have 10G over copper. Has this been discarded in the standard revision?

Block storage?

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

By combining block and file storage on one network, they say, you can cut costs by 50% and simplify IT administration.

What is "block" storage?

bandwidth = performance ?

[magarity]

So how will tcpip networking over this speed measure up to dedicated storage devices like SAN over fibre channel? I have to suspect not; existing iSCSI over 1GB tcpip is a lot less than 1/4 of 4GB fibre to a decent SAN. Sigh, I'm afraid even more of my databases will get hooked up to cheap iSCSI over this instead of SANs space that costs more dollars per capacity but delivers the speed when needed :( Reports coming up fast enough? Remember the planning phase when the iSCSI sales rep promised better performance per $ than SAN? It wasn't better overall performance, just better per $. There's a BIG difference.

Re:Fibre only?

[gmack]

If that's true I'm going to be a tad pissed. I payed extra when I wired my apartment so I could be future proof with cat6 instead of the usual cat5e.

Will there ever be "enough" bandwidth to a home?

[Dr. Spork]

Stories like this always make me think of the following:

I can't think of anyone who's longing to get a fatter gas pipe connected to their house, or a fatter pipe to municipal water, or a cable of higher capacity to bring in more electricity.

But we're not like that with bandwidth. We always seem to want a fatter pipe of bandwidth! Will it forever be like that? Is the household bandwidth consumption ever going to plateau, like electric, gas and water consumption has in the US? (I know that global demand for these utilities is growing, but that's mainly because there are more people and a larger proportion are being hooked up to municipal utilities. The per-household numbers are not really changing very much, and in some cases decreasing.)

Will there be a plateau in bandwidth demand? If so, when and at what level? Thoughts?