Interop brings wave of 10GbE products

By Maury Wright, Editorial Director -- 5/22/2007

In the weeks before Interop, which kicked off May 21 in Las Vegas, suppliers of ICs, board-level network adapters, and software released a flurry of 10GbE (Gbps) Ethernet-compatible products. Without question, the technology is finding use in specialty, high-performance applications. But questions remain about when the technology will go mainstream and what role it will serve.

In the application area, little has changed since mid-2005 (see “Which interface will get traction?” EDN, July 7, 2005, pg 58). Without question, 10GbE will serve in data centers in the traditional LAN role, especially with the prevalence of rich video streams. But proponents believe that 10Gbe will also usurp technologies such as InfiniBand in SAN (storage-area-network) and NAS (network-attached-storage) applications and that it will also usurp InfiniBand and proprietary interconnects in HPC (high-performance-computing) applications based on multicomputer clusters.

Ethernet-market leader Broadcom has been slow to enter the 10Gbe IC market, leaving it to smaller players, such as NetEffect. However, Broadcom acquired one of those smaller players, Siliquent, in August 2005. Now, the company is rolling out a 10GbE member of its C-NIC (converged-networkinterface-controller) family. In this case, “converged” implies that the ICs serve equally well in networking, storage, and clustering applications.

Broadcom’s new BCM57710 IC integrates dual 10GbE ports and includes sufficient on-chip processing to implement a TOE (TCP/IP offload engine) as well as support for iSCSI and RDMA (remote DMA). Presumably, the TOE support is necessary because host CPUs would otherwise spend too much time on network protocol to handle the application at hand. RDMA and iSCSI, meanwhile, allow the chip to better serve cluster and storage applications. Broadcom plans to sell the IC for less than $100 (production volumes).

NetEffect, meanwhile, has begun to offer board-level products that host its 10GbE ICs. The market has yet to begin integrating 10GbE support on motherboards, so the company is trying to spur the market with board-level offerings. Just before Interop, the company announced the NE020 single-port board at a list price of $895.

As one might expect, though, not everyone believes 10GbE will find a market outside the LAN market. Mellanox, for instance, is still pushing InfiniBand as a better and cheaper choice than Ethernet in both clustering and storage roles. In late March, the company announced its latest InfiniBand offerings in chip and board flavors. The company lists the 10-Gbps-capable adapter boards at a starting price of less than $400. But Mellanox is ensuring its bet. The company’s latest chip architecture supports both InfiniBand and Ethernet, and the company will be rolling out Ethernet and Ethernet-plus-InfiniBand chips and boards.

Not all of the Interop 10GbE action took place in ICs. Fulcrum Microsystems, for instance, introduced the ControlPoint software suite to complement its offering of 10GbE switch chips. The development and test tools allow OEMs to quickly develop bridging, switching, and management functions and free the OEMs to concentrate on value-added features.

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