10GbE: What the Heck Took So Long? 295
storagedude writes "10 Gigabit Ethernet may finally be catching on, some six years later than many predicted. So why did it take so long? Henry Newman offers a few reasons: 10GbE and PCIe 2 were a very promising combination when they appeared in 2007, but the Great Recession hit soon after and IT departments were dumping hardware rather than buying more. The final missing piece is finally arriving: 10GbE support on motherboards. 'What 10 GbE needs to become a commodity is exactly what 1 GbE got and what Fibre Channel failed to get: support on every motherboard,' writes Newman. 'The current landscape looks promising. 10 GbE is starting to appear on motherboards from every major server vendor, and I suspect that in just a few years, we'll start to see it on home PC boards, with the price dropping from the double digits to single digits, and then even down to cents.'"
My idea of the perfect cable (Score:2, Interesting)
Four strands, two copper, two fiber.
The two fiber strands enable redundancy (ring topology all the way to the end-point);
The two copper strands for being able to provide power to devices.
That's it. That's all that's needed.
Re:Am I on Slashdot? (Score:5, Interesting)
10GBe won't be as fast as a nice cheap SSD
It doesn't matter, remote storage is faster than gigabit. I don't need to hit 10 to get a benefit.
but not even an SSD can keep up with an avalanche of data requests from multiple systems unless that remote server is pretty damn beefy by home standards.
What? That's the whole point of fileservers. They need to meet the usage, of course, but that's an always increasing spec.
Simpler to keep your OS local, and trivial as far as cost.
Consolidating is always cheaper (per unit of storage) and it's easier to back up and manage, keep on UPS power, etc.
You'll need a heck of a RAID array for that, but it's buildable. Or, you could just stick with GigE, since that still tops out at 125MB/s and that pushes local (non-SSD) storage.
eh, my current central storage is 5 hard drives in a ZFS raidz2 with one SSD split up for L2ARC (cache) and ZIL (write cache). The entirely of the setup difficulty is:
cd /etc/yum.repos.d
wget url-to-repo
yum install zfs
(reboot or modprobe)
zpool create home raidz2 sda sdb sdc sdd sde cache sdf6 log sdf7
Oh, I had to plug in 6 SATA cables. Typical throughput is about 340MB/s. The only reason they're not all SSD's is because SSD's are expensive and unreliable. If it wasn't a home machine, the ZIL would be on a mirror of SSD's.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that this requires a lot more than just a high-speed connection. High-end connection + craptastic router = terrible latency when dealing with high load.
Switch, not router. There are problems with current buffer management techniques that effectively means that higher ceiling room means latency improvements. Google 'bufferbloat'. Things like CoDel will make this better when the pipes are more full, but they're not widely deployed yet.
"I have my home wired up like a datacenter. Everyone else should want a huge amount of network capacity and capability so that it makes my already extravagant costs slightly cheaper."
JHFCOAS - this is Slashdot. What we're doing now is what will be sold in a box for $200 at WalMart in five years. I'm amazed to find tech geeks who don't even know that normal people have been buying inexpensive Buffalo and WD SAN solutions at the office supply store since 2008. And with all this shit going on about the NSA, you can bet people are going to be pulling some of their stuff back out of the cloud.