SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Network infrastructure supplier QLogic Corp. on April 14 introduced a new Ethernet industry association called the 2550100 Alliance.
This is a group of server, storage, networking and software companies that have pledged to coordinate bringing new network solutions to the enterprise IT market based on new 25Gb, 50Gb and 100Gb Ethernet technology.
The announcement was made at the Ethernet Technology Summit, which continues through April 16 here at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
The development of 25Gb, 50Gb and 100Gb products has been driven for a couple of years by hyperscale cloud providers who are seeking a more economical networking solution between 10Gb and 40Gb. For many of these cloud service providers, 10Gb is not enough bandwidth, while 40Gb is overkill at this point.
Because of the potential benefits of 25Gb economics, shipments of 25Gb solutions to hyperscale and enterprise organizations has been projected by Crehan Research to reach 1 million ports faster than previous generations of high-performance Ethernet.
The goal of the 2550100 Alliance is to make it easy for vendors, channel partners and IT organizations to learn, evaluate and implement 25Gb, 50Gb and 100Gb products.
“In contrast to the early ramp of 10GbE, current server platforms are already capable of driving much higher bandwidth than is currently available on the market. Hence, the network has become a real bottleneck, especially in hyper-scale data center environments,” said Crehan Research President Seamus Crehan.
“Given that 25GbE, 50GbE and 100GbE can alleviate this bottleneck in a very cost-effective manner, we are forecasting a much faster adoption curve.”
The new alliance will work closely with the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium and Ethernet Alliance to promote standards.
Primary purposes of the Alliance will be:
–to assist hardware and software vendors with early access to 2550100 networking products, and to work together efficiently to develop solutions;
–to assist channel partners with online and hands-on training and with early access to 2550100 networking products, so they may guide their customers through the migration, and
–to assist IT professionals with education, hands-on training, and early access to 2550100 networking products needed to evaluate and deploy the new technology.
Charter members of the 2550100 Alliance include QLogic, Amphenol, Cavium, DataCore, Finisar, Hitachi Data Systems, Huawei, Ixia, Lenovo, SUSE, Telesoft Technologies, X-IO, and Zadara.
Information about alliance members, program details and how to join can be found here.