Gigabit Ethernet: Prime time for a new standard

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.