Date: 17th Jan 2011

Study says 10GbE NIC/LOM shipments to surpass 16 million ports in 2014

The Linley Group has predicted robust 10GbE growth, the report estimates that 10GbE NIC/LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) shipments will surpass 16 million ports in 2014. The Linley Group's analysis reveals server virtualization and SAN convergence are not only impacting growth, but significantly shaping suppliers' product and technology strategies, particularly as they seek to satisfy the need for multiple protocols.

"In the past, we pointed out that no single 10GbE design satisfied the requirements of all applications," said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst for The Linley Group and co-author of the report. "Entering 2011, however, four vendors are promising universal 10GbE designs that support full offload of TCP, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). The big challenge for these vendors is developing and supporting all of the software required for various protocol offloads and operating systems." The firm also believes that software maturity, in addition to feature and design requirements, will be a critical factor for OEMs when choosing 10GbE vendors.

Linley says with the transition to 10GbE, many new technologies are being added to Ethernet controller designs. Most of these new features are designed to offload processing from the host CPU and therefore, increase throughput or lower CPU utilization. These offloads are divided into three basic categories: stateless offloads that work with traditional operating system stacks; stateful offloads such as TOE that require stack changes; and virtualization offloads for environments such as VMware and Xen. For converged networks, new protocols such as FCoE, iSCSI, and iWARP (RDMA) also come into play, according to Linley.

The vendors mentioned by Linley includes Broadcom, Brocade, Chelsio, Emulex, Exar (Neterion), Intel, Mellanox, Myricom, QLogic, and Solarflare.