Why Now Is the Time to Consider 10 Gigabit Ethernet

In this paper

• Virtualization and cloud are changing enterprise computing, resulting in enterprises rethinking their networking architecture strategies.
• Servers are getting faster and more virtual machines (VMs) are running on each server; 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) connectivity is no longer enough.
• Hardware and software vendors have been designing products to take advantage of 10 GbE, offering enterprises a growing 10 GbE ecosystem.

At one time, data centers were discrete entities consisting of independent silos of computing power and storage bridged together by multiple networks. Servers were consolidated from time to time, but they still used discrete and independent networks such as Token Ring, Ethernet, Infiniband*, and Fibre Channel.

Then along came virtualization and cloud computing. They brought with them a variety of storage technologies and, more recently, software defined networking (SDN). Collectively, these technologies are providing dramatic gains in productivity and cost savings. They are also fundamentally changing enterprise computing and driving a complete rethinking of enterprises´ networking architecture strategies.