Apparent Networks Blog

The marriage of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and virtualization seems a matter of amazingly good timing. 10G did not seem to be offering much new to the networking world apart from being the same as 1G only faster. The urgency of increasing capacity for the most part just wasn't there - at least not in the LAN or the server.

Oh sure, there will always be applications or parts of the network screaming out for more bandwidth, such as backup systems, database servers, and aggregation points in core networks. But most LANs, services and end hosts seemed to have been sated for the time being by 1G and aggregate 1G connections - at least for now and for the foreseeable future. It seemed like 10G would remain a niche capability for a while longer.

This assessment is supported by the fact that 10G has been well ahead of the server technologies; very few machines have been capable of pushing out enough bytes per second to use up even a fraction of that capacity. There are always internal bottlenecks that limit.  This is exactly what happened in the early years of 1G. Few machines could push out more than 300-400 Mpbs, mostly due to driver inefficiencies, limited CPU and slow busses. Nowadays, most solid workstations can get pretty close to 950 Mbps with the right applications pushing out the bytes.

So there wouldn't be much point in arming most machines with 10G, at least for several years to come. And the number of really high-end systems using them would be few and far between. Or so it seemed.

With virtualization taking off like Mentos in a glass of Coke, it suddenly became apparent that the broad-based need for 10G would become a reality much sooner then anticipated. It will still take the hardier servers to fill the pipe - but more and more services are being pulled off smaller individual servers and pushed into virtual machines.  This rush to virtualized consolidation means that there are many more really big machines acting as virtual hosts that can ably fill 10G and more services running out through 10G network interfaces. More switches with 10G ports are following suit. And suddenly the pull for 10G is much higher than it would have been otherwise.

Why does all that matter so much? Well, think of virtualization as a kind of accelerant for networking. For example consider the recent proclamation by folks at Network World that 10G has caused significant shift in network design from three-tier to two-tier. They explicitly reference the influence of virtualization on the impact of 10G networks.

All this indicates that, instead of a long, drawn-out transition to 10G over the next decade, we can expect to see prices come down, performance increase, and capacities all through the network shoot up over a relatively short period of time. Well, except maybe at my house. But that's another story. 40G and 100G may not find as much traction available when they arrive - but it can be assured that Ethernet will continue to dominate networking thanks to this happy convergence of supply and demand.