The Need for Speed
Growth of bandwidth hungry applications is tipping the scale in favor of 10 Gbit Ethernet
By Priyanka Chowdhury
With large organizations adopting bandwidth-hungry and complex set of applications, 10 Gbit Ethernet (or 10G) is expected to grow rapidly thus presenting impressive opportunities to solution providers both in terms of network infrastructure up-gradation and Greenfield opportunities.
“We believe revenues from 10G deployments in Asia will increase from $1.7 billion in 2007 to $5.1 billion in 2012. We also expect to see the same kind of growth in the Indian market. By 2012, 10G is expected to represent almost one-quarter of the revenue in the market. The launch of new products will help to propel growth as those products begin to ramp up in the second half of 2008 and the first half of 2009,” says Tata Rao, Cisco’s Vice President for Systems Engineering.
According to D S Nagendra, General Manager, LAN, Nexans, “The total LAN networking market in India is currently worth Rs 1,200 crore and growing around 15 percent. 10G presently constitutes only ten percent of this. But within the next few years we see demand for 10G networking growing rapidly to achieve 25 percent of the all network deployments.”
What is 10G?
10G was formally ratified as an IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard in June 2002, and is considered to be the fastest of all Ethernet standards. It defines a version of Ethernet with a nominal data rate of 10 Gbits/second, which is ten times faster than Gbit Ethernet. 10G is considered to be the next step for scaling the performance and functionality of enterprise and service provider networks because it combines multi-Gbit bandwidth and intelligent services in order to achieve scaled, intelligent, multi-Gbit networks with links that range in speed from 10 Mbps to 10,000 Mbps.
“Since March 1999, the Ethernet industry has been working on increasing the speed of Ethernet from one to ten Gbits per second. This technology is significant because not only will Ethernet run at 10 Gbits per second and serve as a local area network (LAN) connection, but it will also work in metropolitan area networks (MANs) and wide area networks (WANs). With 10G, network managers will be able to build LANs, MANs and WANs using Ethernet as the end-to-end Layer 2 Transport,” explains Rao.
Adds Mahendra Lalwani, Managing Director, Zyxel Technology, “Nowadays, enterprises that have around 200-500 users at each of their sites, and are running bandwidth-crunchy applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), video conferencing and VoIP, are looking at adopting 10G.”
Macro drivers
With the demand for high performance in specific applications, 10G is becoming the natural requirement especially at the data center and backbone level. The growth is expected to be driven by a number of factors, including increasing supply and decreasing cost of Internet bandwidth. Another driver is the trend of more domestic companies hosting their mission-critical applications such as ERP and CRM at third-party data centers. The Indian data center market is estimated to be worth around $100 million now and is expected to double by 2009. The total cabling market, including data center and enterprise, is expected to grow at 40 percent till 2010.
AMI expects that increasing convergence will also be a growth factor as India’s leading cable operators and telecom companies roll out triple-play services and solutions include the delivery of television, telephony and broadband Internet access over a single network.
“Other than data centers, there are several enterprises which have research centers, and technology and multi-media applications. Since these applications are bandwidth-hungry, companies are looking at adopting 10G for their backbone because high bandwidth will make these applications easier to run,” points out Dileep Kumar, Director, Product Management, ADC Krone.
Nagendra feels that “about two to three years down the line, the industry will see a lot of investment flowing toward, building the right infrastructure in businesses where high-speed networking, or 10G, will play a vital role.”
Adds Chandra Kopparapu, Vice President of Foundry Networks, “Infrastructure is usually spread across wide areas, and many companies have, in remote regions, employees who need data instantly. Such companies need 10G as they need to send to their employees large quantities of information that reside on various bandwidth-hungry applications. These applications consume the LAN bandwidth, often making them slow, therefore technology has shifted from unmanaged to managed switch, and 10/100 Mbps to Giga Backbone (copper and fiber).” Faster and more cost-effective bandwidth is also one of the major drivers for 10G.
Clear benefits
Other than being cheaper in costs, there are a lot of benefits that an enterprise can attain with the implementation of 10G. It not only supports applications that generate multi-Gbit streams, but also provides a longer lifetime of deployments. An enterprise can also benefit from less fiber usage, low cost of ownership, and straightforward migration to higher performance levels.
“10G certainly has a lot of benefits,” comments Rao. “A 10G link uses fewer fiber strands compared to Gbit Ethernet aggregation, which uses one fiber strand per link. This advantage reduces cabling complexity in data centers, and uses existing fiber cabling more efficiently in campus environments where laying additional fiber could be expensive.”
Potential users
10G can’t just be restricted to large enterprises and data centers. It can be implemented in other verticals such as media, telecom, energy and petroleum which transmit huge/bulky images, in any GPS scenario, in the software industry, and in institutional campuses like educational and R&D organizations. It is expected to be used to interconnect LANs, WANs and MANs. “On multimode fiber 10G will support distances up to 300 meters, on single mode fiber it will support distances up to 40 kms. Smaller Gbit Ethernet networks can feed into a 10G network,” says Kumar.
Basically, all customers in any vertical requiring high bandwidth will need 10G. These verticals can range from manufacturing to IT/ITeS. The most important thing to consider in high frequency operations is the control of alien cross-talk in the installation phase. ADC Krone was one of the first to come out with a solution for transferring 10 Gbit data over copper. Foundry Networks recently undertook projects for deploying a 10G network and infrastructure for the New Zealand Technical Institute, as well as for companies such as Helio.
Summing up
With increasing data-sizes and a converging IP applications environment, 10G is expected to become the preferred deployment. The technology has many value-adds for customers. Looking at the way in which people are relying on technology for their businesses, social activities, etc, 10G is definitely going to be an integral part of cutting-edge networks.
Rao sums up the situation neatly. “10G is just a network interface of a broader switching solution. Successful deployments will also incorporate intelligent switching services such as integrated security, high availability, delivery optimization, and enhanced manageability to provide the necessary support for new applications. In addition, to minimize costs, the transition to 10G should take advantage of existing switching investments in modules, chassis and other components.” |