Components Help Forge 10-GigE Pathways

Spurred in part by the Interop Las Vegas event this week, suppliers are full of announcements about 10 Gbit/s Ethernet (10-GigE) components. All claim improvements to chips, adapters, and other elements of future storage systems that will enable the spread of 10GbE in data centers and storage networks.

Several of the announcements stress 10GbE over existing infrastructure, with smaller and greener implementations that should be cheaper for OEMs to incorporate into finished wares. Broadcom, for instance, will show a new physical layer transceiver (PHY) at Interop that is aimed at copper-based IEEE 10GBase-T equipment. The vendor says its single-chip BCM8481 10Gbase-T PHY autonegotiates between 10/100/1000 Mbit/s Ethernet and 10GbE. It operates at short-reach distances up to 100 meters.

On the downside, Broadcom refuses to divulge the power requirements of its new chip.

Startup Aquantia, which scored $26 million in February, plans an Interop demonstration of what it claims is the first PHY component to solve the 10GBase-T power issue.

The firm is debuting with silicon that draws 5.5 watts in a triple-speed port meant for NICs and switches. The component works over a short-reach 100-meter distance. Aquantia says it will offer the chip in the third quarter and anticipates design OEMs (none named) planning 2009 product releases.Meanwhile, another supplier claims to have a low-power 10GbE chip ready as well. Solarflare, whose 10Gbase-T chips also draw under 6 watts of power, says it has partnered with manufacturer Delta Networks, which will use Solarflare's 10GbE and 10Gbase-T chips for networking and storage equipment to be released by Delta OEMs over the next year and a half.

According to analyst Jag Bolaria of The Linley Group consultancy, the advent of low-power, monolithic chips from Aquantia and Solarflare herald progress toward cheaper, greener devices -- key to putting 10GbE into wider use. He also thinks Fujitsu Microelectronics's April 21 announcement of a 26-port 10GbE switch chip could advance the state of the art. "Fujitsu integrates a 10-Gbit/s SerDes [serializer/deserializer] that significantly lowers the price and power dissipation for 10GbE switches," Bolaria notes. He thinks Ethernet switch suppliers should be delivering cheaper, greener wares within the next year.

Other suppliers are adding virtualization software drivers to their 10GbE components, aiming to increase the attractiveness of their solutions for use in OEMs' wares. This is particularly important to vendors who see virtualization as a driver for adoption of iSCSI over 10GbE.

Chelsio, for example, announced today that it's certified a software driver for Citrix XenServer 4.1 with Citrix. Chelsio's ASICs and adapter cards run 10-Gbit/s TCP, iSCSI, and iWARP protocols on a single connection, with or without TCP/IP offload engines (TOE). Chelsio says it's in the process of certifying a VMware driver as well.

Chelsio also revealed adoption of its 10GbE adapters by two more OEMs -- HP and SGI. The only other OEM the vendor has revealed is NetApp.Chelsio rival Neterion, which also supplies components to HP, as well as to IBM and EMC, had its own announcement -- that the drivers for its 10GbE adapters for servers and storage devices will ship in the initial release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and will work with the beta release of Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor software. Intel's 10GbE drivers also have been certified to natively support Windows Server 2008.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.