NetXen Singles Out 10-Gig

Four-year-old NetXen has introduced a programmable 10-Gbit/s Ethernet chip with support for PCI-Express (PCIe), the follow-on bus to Intel's PCI-X. (See NetXen Unveils Interface Chip.)

Up to now, a range of vendors, including Chelsio, Intel, Neterion, and others, have offered 10-Gbit/s chips, but there have been few solutions in one chip with PCIe integration. "This really opens up a new opportunity for 10-Gbit/s in the backplane of blade servers," says Bob Wheeler, senior analyst for networking silicon at The Linley Group consultancy.

Is there a need for this speed just yet? Yes, need is building. Our Egenera blade server platform is upgrading its backplane to 10 Gbit/s, and other products on the market are doing the same," says Bryan Doerr, CTO of service provider Savvis Communications. (See Savvis Stakes Virtualization Claim.)

However, there's a chance that storage, not blade servers, could drive chips like this.

Let's start at the top. NetXen claims its NetXen Intelligent NICs will speed the adoption of 10-Gbit/s backplanes for blade servers by reducing costs to OEMs. Each PCIe board supports one or two 10-Gbit/s ports; is programmable for features such as security, congestion control, and grid computing; and supports upper-layer protocols in firmware. But most importantly, the vendor says, it costs $600 or less in OEM quantities. Dual ports for each 2.25-by-6-inch board don't add cost, the supplier insists."This will take the price of 10-Gbit/s for servers down by a factor of three," boasts Govind Kizhepat, a former Benchmark Capital entrepreneur who is founder and CEO of NetXen. He says an OEM could bring down the cost of a 10-Gbit/s blade server system from $3,000 or so at present to under $1,000, eliminating at least one excuse for not building faster systems.

The question remains, though, as to the actual demand for faster 10-Gbit/s Ethernet. Right now, InfiniBand solutions seem to attract many cluster and server users. But at least one user believes that iSCSI, not blade servers, will ultimately help determine whether 10-Gbit/s Ethernet takes off against its competitors.

"I feel that the introduction of 10G to the blades really is a push for faster iSCSI and NAS solutions, which will definitely rival [Fibre Channel] in the upcoming years," writes Kyle Ohme, director of information technology for Freeze.com, an online promotions company, in an email today. He currently uses IBM blade servers for a range of applications, along with Sun and Bluearc storage. (See Ardence Surfs Streaming Tide.) Right now, there's just no call for the servers to run faster, he says.

"In our environment at the moment, a push to 10G would be storage-centric only (not taking into account general network backplanes)," Ohme writes. But he concedes this could change: "This only holds true standing and looking at this newer technology in 2006. In the short future, as video streaming and other taxing application layers move to the network, the demand will be valid outside of storage. Much like anything in IT, once you have it you use it."

Chelsio spokespeople say a "superset" of what NetXen announced will be available via its next-generation Terminator series, sometime in the coming quarter. Intel and Neterion hadn't responded at press time to enquiries about when they'd have similar capabilities.An integrator says storage applications will play a role in the move to 10-Gbit/s Ethernet, but iSCSI won't necessarily be a catalyst. "Servers are increasingly filling the [Gbyte] limit, so it would speed up many applications like backup, for instance, where throughput is a major issue," writes Daniel Niasoff, IT consultant at Expesys, an integration firm in the U.K.

"Once you reach the stage when you need the performance of [10-Gbit/s Ethernet], you are probably going to find that most consumers will go down the Fibre Channel route," Niasoff writes. "ISCSI is typically going to be the poor man's SAN, which won't have a requirement for 10-Gbit/s."

Indeed, while there's activity in 10-Gbit/s iSCSI, there is no real evidence of momentum behind it just yet. (See 10-Gig IP SANs Hit Bleeding Edge.) That said, suppliers are moving along with new wares in the general data center arena, such as the high-density switch released by Force10 Networks (a switch partner of NetXen's). (See Force10 Intros S2410 and Force 10 Fires Up Low Latency Switch.)

Bottom line? A few more shoes must drop before the shape of the 10-Gbit/s Ethernet market is clearly delineated.

— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: