10-Gigabit Ethernet

It’s not just for blue-chips: Steve Cassidy explains why every business should be using the ultra-fast networking standard

■ Is this really a worthwhile expense for our business? Have you any idea how expensive it is to rewire a building?

It’s understandable that companies are reluctant to tamper with an existing network infrastructure that’s still working perfectly well. By IT business standards, 10GbE has been a slow burn, but this is an easier and cheaper upgrade than you might imagine. While you may see a lot of material about sexy SFP+ fibre ports, it’s nowadays perfectly possible to run 10GbE over well-kept, properly laid Cat 5e twisted-pair cabling. So you may not need to make any wiring changes at all – and if you do, you can take your time over it and work piecemeal.

■ What about the switches? I’ve seen fully grown techies cursing over managed switches even in small networks.

It is true that there are some shockingly awkward network switches out there. I still occasionally find myself dreaming in the old 3Com EI switch-configuration language. But don’t judge the latest equipment by old standards. Any network device you buy today should offer a clean web interface with sensible provision for out-of-band management. And far from frustrating techies, the capabilities of a modern switch, along with the huge bandwidth increase afforded by 10GbE, should enable them to greatly simplify the network architecture, clearing out the old brain-bending LAN architectures that were the cause of so many issues and mysterious slowdowns.

■ Does it really make sense to upgrade to 10GbE now, with 40-Gigabit links already available?

The thing about 40GbE is that it’s a much more expensive upgrade than 10GbE, not least because it does require all-new cabling. It’s also overkill for almost any company whose core business isn’t to do with high-speed connectivity – few current systems are even able to make sensible use of a 40GbE connection. For the realistically foreseeable future, 10GbE is the sweet spot.

■ What if our hardware supplier isn’t ready to go to 10GbE?

I understand that suppliers have to do some strategic thinking on behalf of their customers: if your provider advises you that this particular upgrade would be a waste of money, you should perhaps be grateful for their candour. Ultimately, though, it’s your business, and if the supplier says they can’t supply, then that’s a red flag. The whole reason that 10GbE has been able to break out from enterprise data centres is that it’s so easy to implement: you can drop an affordable card into a PCI-E slot and immediately connect to almost every pre-existing network standard. If your supplier won’t countenance that, it could be trying to nudge you towards an unnecessarily costly hardware upgrade.

■ What about our VoIP supplier? They haven’t cleared 10GbE.

Again, this is all about operators proceeding with a respectable degree of caution. Lots of businesses depend on their phone and computer systems operating in a finely integrated way, and you don’t want to go messing with that willy-nilly. In this case, though, it should be a non-issue: the segmentation and speed arbitration enabled by a central 10GbE switch makes everything better for the phone-centric business, not worse.

■ All our staff are on Wi-Fi anyway, so what’s the point?

It’s true that the old Ethernet cable is something of a tether to the past – for client machines, at least. However, one very strong use case for 10GbE is taking continuous runningstate backups. With a service like Citrix Xen you can quite literally throw your server off the office roof, and by the time you’ve walked down the stairs to pick up the pieces there will be a VM image of that system up and running in the cloud. Something to think about.

“The whole reason that 10GbE has been able to break out from enterprise data centres is that it’s so easy to implement”