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There are two big 10 Gigabit Ethernet “drops” coming out of Interop (held in Las Vegas, April 2008.) The first is price and the second is power. I talked with switch maker Arastra, which announced general availability of its 24- and 48-port 10G Ethernet switches in the approximately $400 per port price range.
Ed Khatuka from optical communications at JDSU (JDS Uniphase) told me about 10G Ethernet transceivers that are going from 15 watts to 5.5 watts of power per port.
These price and power reductions can approach important thresholds for data center managers who are considering a migration path to 10G Ethernet direct-attached networks for servers and storage (the convergence of server and storage networks continued at Interop as well). Here’s an Intel blog post that I found useful in explaining transceiver technology and the alphabet soup of terms used in 10G Ethernet networking.
Other 10 Gig products that caught my eye at Interop were a new switch from Blade Network Technologies that is the company’s first non-blade switch. Cisco was showing its Cisco Catalyst 4900M 10G Ethernet top-of-rack data center server access switch. Woven Systems was showing 10G Ethernet equipment as well.
The 10 Gig direct connect pot is getting ready to boil.