Gigabit Ethernet: Prime time for a new standard

There was once a time when, if the Internet went down for five minutes, no-one seemed to care. These days, if the network crashes for 10 seconds, everyone screams blue murder.

Bandwidth is a familiar issue when talking Internet access and Internet service providers (ISPs), but a number of new technologies are forcing SMEs to address the bandwidth within their networks.

The majority of SMEs still deal in small-sized files – Word documents, email, small spreadsheets – however, the volume of traffic is increasing beyond the maximum 100Mb/s offered by Fast Ethernet (known by its speed rating, 10/100).

What was once an exclusive technology for servers has filtered down to other devices. Over the past five years gigabit Ethernet (at 1Gb/s) has become the new standard, reflected in rising demand and falling prices on switches and hubs. Just 12 months ago the default for small business was 10/100 user ports and a gigabit Ethernet (GbE) backbone.

The market has changed to the point where more than half are looking at GbE for everyone, says Jeff Fulton, network consultant at Netgear. Netgear is now approaching the point of selling more GbE ports than 10/100 ports. “Historically, 10Mb to 10/100 took place when the price [per port for Fast Ethernet] was $30. We are at that changeover now for 10/100 to GbE,” says Fulton. Now the price for 10/100 has sunk to $10–$15 per port.

SLI Consulting watched its customers move over to gigabit Ethernet several years ago, and some are already moving on to 10Gb. The reseller sells to vertical markets in research, manufacturing, joinery, medical, broadcasting and post production, which have higher demands on infrastructure than the average SME. These days the upgrade to gigabit performance is a no-brainer; all the speed with no big investment or learning curve. “Nobody who has business sense will invest in Fast Ethernet networks, laptops or servers,” says Jose Goldmann, territory manager for SLI.

SLI is pushing a number of initiatives on the back of a network upgrade. Redesigning workflow processes and print management is a lucrative money spinner, especially replacing several inkjets with a high-volume laser printer or multi-function printer (MFP).

Hogs on the network

There is a general shift in vertical industries for more speed in the LAN environment. New applications are pushing bandwidth limits, such as heavy CAD programs in construction and MRI scanning in medical. Services such as phone and fax that were once handled by dedicated, analogue networks have made the jump to digital and now run over the one Ethernet network, leading to congestion, packet drop-outs and slow performance.

The most common network killer is the ballooning world of messaging technology. Email, BlackBerry servers, videoconferencing and in particular the gradual take-up of VoIP has wound up bandwidth requirements for even the smaller SMEs.

Other more specialised tasks can also call for fast network connections. Constantly accessing large image or video files from a server is an obvious drain, particularly when that server has multiple users.

Something more mundane – and far common – is the regular backup. Even incremental backups have a habit of slowly adding weight to the point where sitting through the whole process can take many hours. This is not such a problem for backups after hours, at least until the receptionist can’t log on in the morning because the server hasn’t finished backing up.

A third factor has been the transition to broadband Internet connections. Several users all downloading over the one network can also increase lag and frustration.

The much-awaited wireless standard 802.11n (better known in its pre-approval form as ‘Draft N’) brings higher speeds of 200Mb/s to 540Mb/s that require the extra headroom of gigabit Ethernet.

Talking switches

Resellers are witnessing an increase in demand for gigabit motherboards and switches, although the reality is that most desktops and notebooks as well as servers are fitted with gigabit Ethernet by default. This includes an expanding number of devices for the SOHO market.

The exception is dual gigabit. Although it is common for barebone servers it has not yet made it to the desktop. For most purposes, it is overkill; although the network card is about $100, an SME then needs to add the extra infrastructure, including cabling, more ports on switches, and so on.

“If the reseller throws [dual gigabit] in for nix, that’s fine,” says Goldmann. But “most of the time, you won’t deploy the second channel anyway”.

Another trend is the increasing sales of smart switches over unmanaged switches. Fulton says that one reason is that smart switches cost the same or less than an unmanaged switch did a couple of years ago.

SMEs are also increasingly dependent on a single network for communication with the outside world and are happy to spend the money to increase uptime. Smart switches also have the advantages of controlling bandwidth to ensure quality of service, and the ability to troubleshoot by port monitoring.

The two most profitable Cisco products sold by LAN Systems over the past two years were two switches, the Cisco 2950 and 3750 respectively. Nathan Godsall, LAN Systems’ Cisco Solutions trainer, attributes popularity of the latter, a Power over Ethernet layer 3 switch, to the adoption of VoIP telephony by enterprise customers.

More SMEs are reaching up for better control and security on their network, which means moving to layer 3 switches. Many businesses have a combination of voice, data and video running over the one network and need to have it properly managed. A layer switch can provide the quality of service to make sure that a call is not dropped when someone starts to download a file.

Layer 3 also gives more control over applications running on the network. An administrator can permit or deny programs and identify and control traffic. “If you have more control you have more security,” says Godsall.

Users who fail to enter a password when connecting to the network can be quarantined in a guest VLAN or given guest access with restricted rights.

Network vendor Linksys says resellers are selling switches with GbE or fibre uplinks and gigabit VPN routers, some of which come with Draft N and SSL. Linksys is shipping 400-500 units a month of its eight-port Webview switch from its specially targeted SME range, which it launched just four months ago. One popular feature that is driving sales is Power over Ethernet (PoE), a technology that has been around since the 1990s but is now coming into its own. In the standard implementation, PoE sends electricity down the two unused pairs in 10/100 Ethernet to power a wide range of devices: security cameras, webcams, hubs and wireless access points.

However, the most common use these days is to power IP phones in VoIP setups. Running the phone system over the Ethernet network already eliminates the need for a separate phone network; with PoE, a business does not have to worry about power points for its handsets either. “It greatly simplifies setting up the infrastructure,” says Godsall.

The next-generation standard, as yet unreleased, will raise the power from 12.5 watts to 56 watts. The higher-powered PoE+ will be able to run videophones, notebooks, thin clients and pan-tilt-zoom video cameras. Already, non-standard implementations by network vendors reach up to 75 watts, enough to power a small PC.

The cost of PoE adds roughly 30 percent to the cost of a $5000 24-port switch. “It’s certainly very popular but is not something you put on every port,” says Fulton.

PoE can also run over GbE, despite the fact that there are no unused pairs. However, there are very few devices that can be powered by PoE that require a GbE connection. The exceptions are certain top-model IP phones that connect to a laptop so a user can send data at Gb speeds.

Until Draft N is confirmed, PoE over GbE is not useful for wireless points; draft N is only in the SOHO market because it cannot support multiple users in a business environment at higher speeds.

Making money

Networking hardware in the lower end has become a commodity with no space for decent margins. The two biggest add-on sales in networking are storage and messaging, especially VoIP. VoIP has already gone mainstream with the enterprise and in the second half of last year was taken up with gusto by SMEs, says Godsall.

Resellers from both sides of the river are converging on these areas. Data resellers are rolling out smaller IP PABXes with batches of IP handsets, while voice resellers are bundling in routing and switching, says Linksys’ Graeme Reardon, regional director A/NZ.

More than 250 resellers turned up for the Linksys training program last year, including many data specialists wanting to know how to move into other spheres. Following the pace of change, Linksys intends to release products with 10 gigabit uplinks later this year.

Cisco has been working hard to turn its data resellers into voice experts. One high-selling product has been the enterprise-focused Call Manager and the SMB version, Call Manager Express. This software turns a Cisco router into a PABX. “It’s a really easy way to move from data to doing voice and data,” says Godsall. Call Manager Express handles up to 240 users, including simultaneous multiple conferencing calls among 96 users. Cisco bundles the software with a router in its 2811 model, which has an RRP of $6500 and manages up to 36 users.
While not an overly large driver of bandwidth consumption, video is finding a home in some verticals, such as education. Private schools are using video-on-demand to play back recorded lessons, either to a main TV or to students’ laptops.

Another technology a long time coming, videoconferencing is finally moving off the movie screens and into corner offices. Once it required special rooms with expensive, custom set-ups, but now videoconferencing to desktop is slowly gaining ground and forcing businesses to upgrade the backbone to eliminate bottlenecks. “It’s tough to get that through the WAN but first you have to get through the LAN,” says Godsall. Cisco’s unified communications messaging system automatically connects calls by clicking on address book entries; the phone call can then be bumped up to video with a second click.

While videoconferencing is still in its protracted infancy, few seem to doubt that SMEs will one day make video calls as a matter of habit.

The next step up from videoconferencing could single-handedly force many SMEs to upgrade to 10GbE – once the technology gets a little cheaper. Telepresence delivers a life-size image of a co-worker on an ultra-high definition screen with spatial audio. Cisco’s cheapest system costs around half a million dollars and requires a throughput of 2-4Mb/s per screen.

There is plenty of puff left in the race of innovation to counter bandwidth consumption. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) began reviewing submissions in November 2006 for 100GbE running over optical fibre.

Plenty to store

IP has long been heralded as the cheap and easy way to solve storage problems for SMEs. Storage vendors have been talking about iSCSI technology for three years, but there has been little to show for it.

“At last there is some rubber meeting the road,” says Mark Ransom, storage alliance manager, LAN Systems. Ransom says data resellers are finding easy value-adds to networking sales with entry-level disk arrays.

Network attached storage (NAS) has been around on IP networks for some time, but now storage area networks (SANs) are also making a showing. NAS products allow several users to access one file at the same time, such as database applications, while SANs are used for shared storage.

There is one prickly point that storage vendors frequently fail to mention when marketing their IP storage products: can the network handle it? A customer who hooks up storage to a 10/100 network without first testing its load may be in for a rude shock the next time he or she tries to move a large file from one PC to another. Sometimes performance is so impaired that a second, separate IP network is required just for the storage.

Although a second 10/100 network will always be cheaper than implementing fibre channel, buying and installing the necessary switches and cables can blow out an ill-prepared budget. “Some storage vendors want people to think that it is very easy to hook storage onto an IP network but don’t talk about the loss of performance,” says one reseller who prefers to remain anonymous.
Upgrading to 10GbE without conducting due diligence on the customer’s network may not solve the problem either. “Don’t just plunk [10GbE] in there and assume everything will be hunky-dory,” says Ransom. Depending on the application – disaster recovery, for example – a slower 10/100 network might be ideal. “For the customer it’s a capital investment and they want to be wise with the money they are spending,” he says.

Living room to corner office

The SOHO market is also facing pressure to upgrade. Although the uptake of media centres for home entertainment is sluggish, rival vendors continue to release new products every six months. Apple is the latest to market with its Apple TV, and if the set-top box does half as well as that icon of digital consumerism, the iPod, resellers could see many more opportunities in the home for gigabit networks and disk storage.

“The bandwidth requirements of home users is really starting to go up,” says Godsall, noting that a household can download movies, music, digital pictures and video streaming from sites like YouTube.

Altech, which sells the Maestro Media Centre with integrated gigabit Ethernet, is seeing growing demand in homes for higher data transfer rates to cope with streaming video from servers, says Viktoria Kulikova, national marketing manager at Altech. And in response to the rising speed and storage appetite in SOHO, Netgear has released storage products for the home user. In a sign of the times, Netgear has already released the SC101 Turbo, which comes with GbE ports and 100Mb/s throughput. Linksys has also readied a network storage device for launch within the coming weeks.

The emphasis in the SOHO market has been to drop the price rather than increase speeds or features. This reflects the fact that most traffic is to the Internet rather than other devices on its local network. This is now changing. “I think [home storage] is a market that’s growing substantially,” says Fulton. He says that SOHO storage is maturing to the point where it is no longer tied to a PC.

Fulton expects to see GbE make an appearance in homes this year.

At the higher end, products try to minimise downtime through technologies such as split multi-link trunking (SMLT), says David Sharp at Nortel distributor Anixter. For banks and telecentres running large-scale VoIP operations, a 40 second fail-over in the middle of a call can mean lost business. SMLT products can click over in less than 0.7 seconds, which will sound like a momentary bleep in the conversation.

The take-up of gigabit Ethernet has made more work for RAD Data Communications, a transmission company that specialises in the last-mile connection from the telco’s backbone to the business customer’s front door.
Itzik Swissa, senior business development manager at RAD, says he believes that many SMEs do not require massive bandwidth today but are buying gigabit-enabled devices anyway because prices have dropped so low. The sophistication of applications and the convergence of voice, data and video are also driving demand for higher bandwidth, says Swissa. The benefit of the extra capacity GbE delivers to the LAN is difficult to translate once it leaves the company’s network, particularly in regional Australia. “Big pipes are really scarce and there are not many communication options for customers,” says Swissa.

Gigabit hangs 10

The 10GbE switches remain relatively expensive – SLI’s Goldmann estimates by seven to eight times more than Fast Ethernet.

In revenue terms, 10GbE made up 7 percent of LAN switch revenue shipments in the third quarter 2006, up from 2 percent of LAN switch revenues in third quarter 2005, according to data from research company IDC.

10GbE’s time in the sun is inching closer now that user ports are up to 1Gb. The backbone, always one step ahead, must make the leap to ensure it does not become the bottleneck. Netgear has had a 10GbE product out for 12 months, but it has not sold highly and is unlikely to while it remains cheaper to aggregate GbE, says Fulton.

The day will come when 10GbE is the new standard, but for now most SMEs will probably make do with a GigE network. Unless your customers are in post production and broadcasting, that is. SLI’s Goldmann says he is looking forward to another year of network upgrades. For SLI, “this year is prime time” for 10GbE infrastructure.