Fujitsu and Myricom achieve wirespeed with 10-Gigabit Ethernet 4 May, 2006 By Chris Talbot

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Fujitsu has been in the 10-Gigabit Ethernet business for about 2.5 years, but Myricom just recently released its 10-Gigabit Ethernet NIC, said Vic Herring, senior director of the new products group at Fujitsu Computer Products of America.

"They seem to have a very, very fast NIC card. They can sustain performance of 9.92 gigabits per second, which is pretty much the fastest performance we've seen from anybody to date yet," Herring said. He added that Fujitsu has tested many different NIC cards, and the best of the bunch prior to the Myricom card performed at a little better than 8Gbps.

Since 10-Gigabit Ethernet products started hitting the market, it has been a chore to reach anything near 10Gbps. Prior to the release of PCI-Express, the best many cards could pull off was about 5Gbps to 6Gbps, Herring said. With PCI-Express, 10-Gig networks are able to experience something closer to wirespeed, but even still, they typically top out just over 8Gbps, he added.

"PCI-Express opens the pipe up to the computer to allow wirespeed to be achieved," Herring said. Myricom is one of the first companies to come out with a PCI-Express NIC, he added.

The inability of NICs to achieve wirespeed and the high price has limited the adoption of 10-Gigabit Ethernet, but as now that wirespeeds are becoming attainable and prices will continue to fall, there will be more growth in the 10-Gigabit Ethernet market, Herring said.

Herring predicted there would be more adoption in 2006, but the "hockey stick" part of the adoption rate would start to show itself in 2007.

"Last year, there was interest but no purchase orders. This year there's interest and purchase orders," Herring said.

However, the demand for 10-Gigabit Ethernet is still fairly low right now, even if that demand will continue to increase in the next two or three years, he said. The biggest demand in the immediate future will be in high-performance computing environments, as well in WAN and SAN environments, he said.

"A lot of these high performance large box storage applications are where the new growth is for 10-Gig Ethernet," Herring said.

For the time being, the biggest opportunities for the channel will be in large enterprises, although over time 10-Gigabit Ethernet will move downmarket.

"The channel partners, they do call on some high-end small enterprise-class customers, so there's opportunities for them to make sales. Many of our sales are coming through our channel partners today. But I think that will grow over the next two or three years because of the pricing curve and the availability of 10-Gig Ethernet products across the board," Herring said.