by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Enterprises are seeing more adoption of 10 gigabit Ethernet according to a report by Network Instruments, and reported on their Network Observations blog that nearly one quarter of businesses are implementing 10G networks by the end of the year. The larger the company, the more likely a 10G rollout.

There’s certainly evidence of a trend, but is that evidence of a need-based demand? LAN technology at the gigabit Ethernet level typically has low latency – and I don’t see 10G Ethernet helping with that much if at all. Gigabit Ethernet is still a heck of a lot of bandwidth, especially compared to the bandwidth offered by WAN solutions. In any LAN/WAN/LAN traffic path, it’s almost always the WAN that proves to be the bottleneck.

But it is possible, with large VoIP networks, that you could be overloading the LAN capacity and decide to move to 10G for that reason. This could possibly explain why big companies are more likely to have 10G than smaller companies – because if you’re not hitting the bottleneck on the LAN, 10G doesn’t really help you deliver the applications any faster or effectively.

What I think is more likely is that 10G has hit a price point where it costs about as much to roll out 10G as it does the older technologies. Instead of 10G taking over the market from companies migrating from 1G, instead it seems that when companies choose to build new systems, they’re choosing to build them in 10G instead of 1G.

But again, it comes down to application delivery. And if we’re not delivering applications faster, the question is then asked – is there any application that is not feasible to execute on a 1G network for which a 10G network would be suitable?

Then I remembered that I’m a geek, and I like my toys.

Specifically, when I move into my new apartment next month, I’ll be back on my own router hardware. My current place has Ethernet built in – it’s a feature that saves me $50 a month, but the complex houses its own routers, which I have no capability to port-forward, which means that I can’t set up a remote desktop connection so that I can check on my home computer from work. And looking forward to being able to do that again reminds me that perhaps one of the new applications that could propel an adoption to 10G might be combining virtualization with remote desktop software – that is, making the end users work from their desk computers on a virtualized environment on a server. This means that you get more life out of older but still usable desktop hardware. According to the FAQ from RealVNC, at 100Mbps per connection, “most tasks will be indistinguishable performed remotely from if they were performed locally” Still, 100Mbps fills up a 1Gbps LAN pretty quickly. However, a 10Gb LAN might be able to accommodate this new application.

There are limitations – anything using full screen video or animation (a movie, or a 3-D environment) where there are rapid changes of every pixel will require even more bandwidth before it gets “choppy” – which will probably sink my plans of playing Half Life 2 on my Mac via a remote desktop connection to a PC. But this is certainly one of those “think about it” half baked ideas that may become reality in the near future.