Has the IEEE 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard--approved in June 2002--become a hardware reality you can put to work in your network? Yes, if your budget is as fat as those eggnog guzzlers sweating on stairclimbers this time of year. Although the cost of 10 Gigabit Ethernet is dropping, for the foreseeable future you'll likely pay tens of thousands of dollars for each connection. That's as hard to swallow as a diet cookie given the fiscal constraints that still encumber many IT departments.
Even harder to swallow, though, are overloads on a mission-critical network. Traffic congestion impacts business directly and negatively, possibly enough to justify the expense of implementing 10 Gigabit now.
With this in mind, we called vendors offering standards-based 10-gigabit switches many months ago to give them a heads up about our plans to test products in this category. We asked for their input on testing and ensured there were no potential resource conflicts with trade shows. We limited the 10-gigabit port density to two, so it wouldn't be cost-prohibitive to tie up the hardware while we did our testing (most initial installations of 10 gigabit will be limited to a few ports anyway).
Finally, after much preparation, we sent invitations to Alcatel, Cisco Systems, Enterasys Networks, Extreme Networks, Force10 Networks, Foundry Networks, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Nortel Networks. When push came to shove, though, only Extreme and Foundry rose to the challenge. Alcatel did not have product, while Cisco, Force10, HP and Nortel simply declined to participate. Enterasys offers a standalone 10-gigabit Layer 2 switch that did not meet the requirements of our tests, even though it reportedly had been updated with an 802.3ae-compatible interface.
Extreme's BlackDiamond and Foundry's BigIron proved that there are at least two companies that offer serious 802.3ae-based connectivity--and are ready to put their switches where their advertising claims are. Not only did the BlackDiamond and BigIron boxes interoperate with the standard and each other, they maintained impressive performance levels even when subjected to tests their competitors ducked. And they offer a wide range of features--from high availability to support for all major routing protocols to multicast routing and QoS (Quality of Service). We were impressed.
Unlike that of Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet, true 10 Gigabit Ethernet performance isn't a given. We're not yet at the point where chips providing Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding at wire speed are readily available, and you must factor in features, such as access lists and QoS, that require even more processing power for every packet sent. And beaucoup packets are being sent--wire speed for 10 Gigabit Ethernet makes it possible to forward 30 million per second on each interface versus 3 million for gigabit.
Of course, these hurdles haven't stopped many vendors from shipping 10-gigabit products; we can only speculate about why it stopped them from participating in our tests.
In spite of the challenges presented by 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Extreme and Foundry hit the ground running. But because architectural constraints limit each card to an 8-gigabit connection to the backplane, bandwidth was limited to 8 gigabits in each direction between the ports and backplanes. So, instead of having 10 times the bandwidth of Gigabit Ethernet, you'll see an eightfold increase. This is a little disappointing, but both vendors were very open about it, reasoning that eight times 1 gigabit is still a dramatic improvement for anyone who has exceeded the capacity of Gigabit Ethernet. We found it hard to argue with that line of reasoning, especially considering that the full 8 gigabits of bandwidth held up so well under our the worst-case scenarios in our tests.
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