<story><title>Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/intel-wants-to-kill-the-traditional-server-rack-with-100gbps-links/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jbooth</author><text>Even without crazy fabric setups, how have we been stagnating at 1GbE for like 10+ years now?  Shouldn&apos;t 10, with a normal ports-and-switches type of setup become normal someday soon?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdl</author><text>The standard thing to do now is 2-4GE per server, link aggregated (possibly split across two switches for redundancy), using multiple 48-port GE switches with multiple 10GE uplinks, and then usually something like the Juniper $10-20k 40-port 10GE switches.  Some specific servers like SANs go direct 10GE, particularly if you&apos;re going to have 1-2 SAN interfaces and a bunch of clients (so you can use the 10GE uplink ports for it).&lt;p&gt;Enough things are CPU/memory/etc. bound that the &quot;cheap&quot; building block of a 1-2CPU server with 4GE, RAM, and some local disk is still more appropriate than buying a Xeon E7 with 10GE HBAs, in most cases.  There might be an exception if you have per-host vs. per-core licensing for expensive stuff, or other artificial complaints, or a specific component (database?) which doesn&apos;t horizontally scale.&lt;p&gt;I predict $5k 40-port 10GE switches and commodity server on-board 10GE NICs in a couple years, though.  Although at that point, you need something crazy to uplink the switches.  40GE is emerging, or you could use a non-ethernet option.  SANs are the big application for 10GE now since you can comfortably fit all the clients and servers on a standard 10GE switch and don&apos;t need to uplink most of the traffic.  Part of the issue with the higher speed ethernets is lack of a copper cabling option, particularly one which works with existing cable plants.  (less of a concern within racks).</text></comment>
<story><title>Intel wants to kill the traditional server rack with 100Gbps links</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/intel-wants-to-kill-the-traditional-server-rack-with-100gbps-links/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jbooth</author><text>Even without crazy fabric setups, how have we been stagnating at 1GbE for like 10+ years now?  Shouldn&apos;t 10, with a normal ports-and-switches type of setup become normal someday soon?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lmm</author><text>I think mainly there&apos;s not the demand for it - you&apos;d need a fast SSD to saturate 1GbE, and nothing remotely consumer-level can saturate 10GbE yet.</text></comment>