You have heard many people at Emulex and most other vendors who sell 10Gb/s Ethernet (10GbE) gear talk about the move to 10GbE. However, we wanted to take this opportunity to share some input from the customer community. We commissioned IT Brand Pulse to reach out to their database of Ethernet customers and ask them why they are moving or considering moving to 10GbE as they make their plans for 2010 and beyond. I don’t think the results will be a big surprise to most, but sometimes a little confirmation is a good thing.

First, let’s look at some market data. According to a February 2010 report from the Dell’Oro Group, the 10GbE server adapter market will grow from $180 million to $775 million by 2013. As we know, when you solve one bottleneck in the IT world, it simply moves somewhere else in the data center. In the never-ending game of leapfrog between CPU speeds and I/O, the CPU guys have just made a big move. There are four primary driving forces of the transition to 10GbE.

• The launch of new server platforms from Intel and AMD, giving data center managers a wide range of cost-effective six- and eight-core processors for dual- and four-socket servers.
• The “bottleneck” is moving from processors to I/O, requiring native 10GbE network connections to capitalize on the increased processing power provided by multi-core CPUs.
• The huge up-tick in virtualized platform adoption, especially in this “do more with less” economy, requires higher bandwidth I/O for all those virtual machines (VMs).
• Virtualization and the “I/O Blender,” as Steve Duplessie from ESG calls it, occurs when you try to put many VMs with multiple I/O patterns on the same systems. Sorting them used to be hard, but our new OneCommand Vision™ I/O management software tackles that problem.

The following are highlights excerpted from the IT Brand Pulse – 10GbE NIC Survey. When users were asked to rate the primary issue/concern they have with 1GbE Network Interface Cards (NICs) today, over 50% said it was performance. IT Brand Pulse believes this data validates the shift of the bottleneck from CPU to I/O. Again, the key issue is not that most individual applications need more than 1Gb, it is that when you aggregate multiple applications on a single system, the combined demand creates the I/O bottleneck.

When asked, “What’s the application in your data center that is driving the adoption of 10Gb Ethernet?” not surprisingly, virtualization was the leader, with close to 50% of the respondents indicating that server virtualization is driving the need for larger I/O pipes. One interesting point in this result is that iSCSI, Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) combine to total 21% of the responses focused on storage solutions. This shows how network convergence is gaining traction on a single 10GbE Local Area Network (LAN) in the data center.

Last, we wanted to know what IT professionals were thinking about when considering 10GbE adoption and migration, and asked them to comment on what best describes the status of migration from 1GbE to 10GbE in their environment. Close to 45% of the respondents are in the investigation stage, which points to an increasing adoption rate over the years to come. This confirms what we have discussed in many previous blogs by the team here at Emulex. The market will be deployed in phases over a three-to-five-year window. As IT managers retire their current servers, they will move to next-generation servers, especially blades servers with virtual I/O capabilities (Cisco UCS, Dell, HP FlexFabric, IBM Virtual Fabric), which all use 10GbE to create virtual connections. The move to 10GbE is on and converging storage traffic onto these high-performance pipes will happen with NAS and iSCSI first, and FCoE will follow.

We created the following chart using the data from this survey and what we have been seeing in the field with IT managers. I think it does a reasonable job of illustrating how the 10GbE transition will occur in the market.

The move to 10GbE will be migration, first driven by high-bandwidth Ethernet for server virtualization. NAS and 10GbE iSCSI will be the next-use cases, since they will require no or minimal changes. And finally, as we have said many times, 2010 will be the year of FCoE pilots and full deployments will begin in 2011 and go on for many years. Finally, as we move into 2012, we will see IT departments deploying network convergence as the primary I/O model in the data center.

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