Performance of 10GB Ethernet in Small and Medium Businesses

Fig 1: 10-Gigabit Ethernet Connection

10 gigabit Ethernet is an advanced telecommunication technology which can offer data communication speed up to 10 billion bits per second. It’s also referred as 10GE, 10GbE or 10GigE. Today the increasing need for high bandwidth, affordable prices for high speed fibre connections, and falling prices on 10GbE networking equipments are forcing the business people to think about upgrading wired office network. 10GbE will soon become the core of any next generation data centre. The first 10GbE connections were made up of optical fibres which made them expensive. Connections made with optical fibre were best suited for high bandwidth data centres and server rooms. However the use of copper wires instead of fibre optic had made a fall in the price of 10GbE equipments.

The important thing to note about 10GbE is that, it can be easily deployed within existing networks also. 10GbE protocols are fully interoperable with existing Ethernet protocols. It’s a full-duplex protocol which doesn’t need Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) protocols. That’s the only difference between 10GB Ethernet and traditional Ethernet. As the need for high bandwidth increases 10GbE can be easily installed with existing networks which can provide a high speed, low latency network connection in a cost-effective way.

• Benefits of 10GbE:
  
  The use of 10GbE reduces maintenance and administrative costs, allowing small and medium businesses to focus on their business critical tasks. It also helps to meet the increasing bandwidth requirements, the need for new applications and the demands of a high speed business environment. 

•  Provides a simple low cost solution: 
  
  
      One main benefit is that it offers a low cost solution for bandwidth issues. Cost requirements for installation, maintenance and management are minimal as well. Management and maintenance can be done by local network administrators.
  
  
•  High speed and scalability: 
  
  
     The most important difference between 1 GB and 10GbE is in the performance speed. The growth and popularity of 10GbE will make greater deployment of virtualized servers and unified networks, providing unparalleled throughput. It may be expensive; the servers can handle more network data than ever before.
  

     
        As 10GbE uses the same Ethernet format it allows faster switching. The packet   fragmentation, reassembling or address translations are not needed here, and it eliminates the need for routers that are much lower than switches. It also offers straight forward scalability. Since the upgrade paths are similar to that of 1-Gigabit Ethernet, upgrading an existing network cabling infrastructure to 10-Gigabit Ethernet ix extremely simple.

•             More security and protection: ·        The second most important difference between 1GB and 10GbE is in the aspect of security. 10GB Ethernet networks are far more secure. The regular Cat5/Cat6 cables may leak information in to the air. That process is known as frequency emanation. With enough time and patience hackers can intercept the data signals and can gain access to your network through the network cabling. It’s a common method known as ‘Vampire-Tapping’. 10GbE make use of fibre optic cabling. These cables never cause frequency emanations and it’s extremely difficult to tap the network cables without disturbing the interrupting the data service. 

Virtualization is becoming an important tool day-by-day for more fully harnessing and managing the power of today’s data centre servers. Virtual machines can boot more quickly than other machines, and the programs installed in it can be more responsive, when the I/O is no longer limited to 1Gbps. Today the utilization level of servers has increased and now fewer servers are required to do the same work which contributes to greater energy efficiency and lower power and cooling costs. While using 10-Gigabit Ethernet in virtualized environments, the most important benefit is its affordability. Low cost solutions, lower latency, increased bandwidth, reduced power and cooling requirements, fewer cable ports and NIC’s to manage, and the capability to consolidate I/O on a single network makes the 10-Gigabit Ethernet as the best choice for today’s increasing network requirements.