Planning for 10 Gigabit
I had a very interesting conversation the other day with Greg Scherer, CTO for Neterion. Neterion just announced the release of a 10 Gigabit network adapter, the
X3100 series. Greg is a fascinating guy to talk to. Being the former CTO of Emulex, he's got some real insight into the virtualization arena.
One of the first questions I asked him was about the viability of the 10Gbps market. He estimates it at about 10 percent, and that seems about right to me. Fortunately for Neterion, they're not counting on this product to make or break the company. He said Neterion predicts steady, rather than spectacular, growth for the X3100, and the dual-channel version, X3120, coming out this summer. Neterion still makes its real money with standard hardware server and storage adapters.
It got me to thinking, though: how far along are your plans for 10Gbps? If you're looking at a highly virtualized environment, it's probably something you've either instituted or are planning for right now. If you're going to be getting into other virtualization technologies like virtual desktop infrastructure or disaster recovery, you're likely looking hard at it, too.
So let me know what's happening with your infrastructure plans, either below or via e-mail. Tell me what bandwidth you currently have, what you expect to be virtualizing in the near future, and how you'll be upgrading your bandwidth to accomodate the changes.
Posted by Keith Ward on 04/02/2009 at 12:48 PM