5 ms·

Even without crazy fabric setups, how have we been stagnating at 1GbE for like 10+ years now? Shouldn't 10, with a normal ports-and-switches type of setup beco

by jbooth 14y ago

Even without crazy fabric setups, how have we been stagnating at 1GbE for like 10+ years now? Shouldn't 10, with a normal ports-and-switches type of setup become normal someday soon?

lmm 14y ago
I think mainly there's not the demand for it - you'd need a fast SSD to saturate 1GbE, and nothing remotely consumer-level can saturate 10GbE yet.
- rdl 14y ago
  1Gbps (125MB/sec) is pretty easy from RAID (or even really good drives), and obviously trivial out of RAM.
- vidarh 14y ago
  > you'd need a fast SSD to saturate 1GbE Or pretty much any decently spec'ed new RAID array. Most of our "recent" arrays are in the 300MB/sec to 500MB/sec range and were not particularly expensive. But you're probably right - while it'd be nice to be able to hang those arrays off iSCSI or export network filesystems that can reach those kind of speeds, it's rare-ish to need it. Saturating GbE in a way that doesn't make it just as easy to "just" bond a couple of interfaces together or spread your IO load over a couple extra servers is a pretty special case still. I'd love to be able to justify 10GbE in our network, but I can't until it costs almost as little as GbE. > and nothing remotely consumer-level can saturate 10GbE yet. Not much consumer level even saturates Fast Ethernet. Especially given how much consumer equipment today still hangs off 54Mbps or below wifi... I don't think that's really an argument - most 1GbE equipment likely still goes to corporate networks.
- jbooth 14y ago
  A single HDD can almost saturate 1GbE with sequential reads from the disk with no caching. What if you have 2 HDDs, or are serving data that's cached?
- barrkel 14y ago
  Standard modern HDD serves up ~150MB/sec, SATA 6Gbps SSD over 500MB/sec for large sequential I/Os. Both easily saturate 1GbE. At home, I'm running an 8-port SATA RAID controller (but with ZFS, so not using the RAID firmware). I'd say it could saturate 10GbE. But it's true I'm not the average consumer.
- mason55 14y ago
  Who says it has to come from hard drives? Look at things like redis or memcached that are serving out of RAM.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - noselasd 14y ago
    But (ordinary) people don't run redis on their home network. 10Gb Ethernet is very common on servers in datacenters today, but it hasn't yet caught on to the consumer market.
- vectorjohn 14y ago
  You could have at least /glanced/ at current hardware before saying this. The cheap SSDs on the market now can saturate four times 1GbE. There is definitely demand for SSDs, and they're getting to the point where it is not expensive to just have a pretty big SSD and no spinning disk at all. So to me it is surprising there is no inexpensive 10GbE option. People always like it when they don't have to see a loading bar, and even gigabit ethernet is slower than HDD to HDD.
- jdboyd 14y ago
  Many of the currently available SATA hard drives will saturate 1GbE.
- fulafel 14y ago
  Sata (a single disk link tech. for consumer gear) went from 3 to 6 Gbps years ago, before SSDs went mainstem.
mseebach 14y ago
A 4K HD broadcast is 40 Mbit/s. There are just very few usecases where you need anything faster than 100Mbit, much less 1Gbit.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- kayoone 14y ago
  LAN file transfers with 100MBit/s are very slow, even by todays standards. I always hate to get big files from our NAS at 7-8MB/s when a proper GBit device can achieve 10x that. That isnt even shared, if 2 or more people try to get files from the thing, you can basically forget it.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  About three months ago, we had an IT maintenance event over the weekend where our phones were replaced with VoIP systems. When I came in on Monday morning, I had a brand new Polycom CX-600 on my desk, which was great - but all of a sudden, Visio, VMware, and all of the Apps that were working out of my home directory - were really, really sluggish. Not unusable, but really long lags every time I tried to open a file. Turns out the VoIP phones were now acting as switches for all the Desktops, and my Desktop had been plugged into the phone, which, you guessed it - only had a 100 Mbit interface. Moving my desktop back to my (still lit) Gigabit port returned me to my regular speedy connection. Gigabit makes a big difference. I'd hate to throw around multi-100 megabyte files on 100 megabit network connections.
jsz0 14y ago
10Gbit is very commonly used in SANs now.
rdl 14y ago
The standard thing to do now is 2-4GE per server, link aggregated (possibly split across two switches for redundancy), using multiple 48-port GE switches with multiple 10GE uplinks, and then usually something like the Juniper $10-20k 40-port 10GE switches. Some specific servers like SANs go direct 10GE, particularly if you're going to have 1-2 SAN interfaces and a bunch of clients (so you can use the 10GE uplink ports for it). Enough things are CPU/memory/etc. bound that the "cheap" building block of a 1-2CPU server with 4GE, RAM, and some local disk is still more appropriate than buying a Xeon E7 with 10GE HBAs, in most cases. There might be an exception if you have per-host vs. per-core licensing for expensive stuff, or other artificial complaints, or a specific component (database?) which doesn't horizontally scale. I predict $5k 40-port 10GE switches and commodity server on-board 10GE NICs in a couple years, though. Although at that point, you need something crazy to uplink the switches. 40GE is emerging, or you could use a non-ethernet option. SANs are the big application for 10GE now since you can comfortably fit all the clients and servers on a standard 10GE switch and don't need to uplink most of the traffic. Part of the issue with the higher speed ethernets is lack of a copper cabling option, particularly one which works with existing cable plants. (less of a concern within racks).
fulafel 14y ago
one of the reasons is the stagnating internet connection speeds. In 13 years my net connection speed has only slightly more than doubled (10 to 24 Mbps). we should be getting Gbit internet connections and running 10 Gbit home/office networks.

by jbooth 14y ago

Even without crazy fabric setups, how have we been stagnating at 1GbE for like 10+ years now? Shouldn't 10, with a normal ports-and-switches type of setup become normal someday soon?

lmm 14y ago

I think mainly there's not the demand for it - you'd need a fast SSD to saturate 1GbE, and nothing remotely consumer-level can saturate 10GbE yet.

rdl 14y ago
1Gbps (125MB/sec) is pretty easy from RAID (or even really good drives), and obviously trivial out of RAM.
vidarh 14y ago
> you'd need a fast SSD to saturate 1GbE Or pretty much any decently spec'ed new RAID array. Most of our "recent" arrays are in the 300MB/sec to 500MB/sec range and were not particularly expensive. But you're probably right - while it'd be nice to be able to hang those arrays off iSCSI or export network filesystems that can reach those kind of speeds, it's rare-ish to need it. Saturating GbE in a way that doesn't make it just as easy to "just" bond a couple of interfaces together or spread your IO load over a couple extra servers is a pretty special case still. I'd love to be able to justify 10GbE in our network, but I can't until it costs almost as little as GbE. > and nothing remotely consumer-level can saturate 10GbE yet. Not much consumer level even saturates Fast Ethernet. Especially given how much consumer equipment today still hangs off 54Mbps or below wifi... I don't think that's really an argument - most 1GbE equipment likely still goes to corporate networks.
jbooth 14y ago
A single HDD can almost saturate 1GbE with sequential reads from the disk with no caching. What if you have 2 HDDs, or are serving data that's cached?
barrkel 14y ago
Standard modern HDD serves up ~150MB/sec, SATA 6Gbps SSD over 500MB/sec for large sequential I/Os. Both easily saturate 1GbE. At home, I'm running an 8-port SATA RAID controller (but with ZFS, so not using the RAID firmware). I'd say it could saturate 10GbE. But it's true I'm not the average consumer.
mason55 14y ago
Who says it has to come from hard drives? Look at things like redis or memcached that are serving out of RAM.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- noselasd 14y ago
  But (ordinary) people don't run redis on their home network. 10Gb Ethernet is very common on servers in datacenters today, but it hasn't yet caught on to the consumer market.
vectorjohn 14y ago
You could have at least /glanced/ at current hardware before saying this. The cheap SSDs on the market now can saturate four times 1GbE. There is definitely demand for SSDs, and they're getting to the point where it is not expensive to just have a pretty big SSD and no spinning disk at all. So to me it is surprising there is no inexpensive 10GbE option. People always like it when they don't have to see a loading bar, and even gigabit ethernet is slower than HDD to HDD.
jdboyd 14y ago
Many of the currently available SATA hard drives will saturate 1GbE.
fulafel 14y ago
Sata (a single disk link tech. for consumer gear) went from 3 to 6 Gbps years ago, before SSDs went mainstem.

mseebach 14y ago

A 4K HD broadcast is 40 Mbit/s. There are just very few usecases where you need anything faster than 100Mbit, much less 1Gbit.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
kayoone 14y ago
LAN file transfers with 100MBit/s are very slow, even by todays standards. I always hate to get big files from our NAS at 7-8MB/s when a proper GBit device can achieve 10x that. That isnt even shared, if 2 or more people try to get files from the thing, you can basically forget it.
ghshephard 14y ago
About three months ago, we had an IT maintenance event over the weekend where our phones were replaced with VoIP systems. When I came in on Monday morning, I had a brand new Polycom CX-600 on my desk, which was great - but all of a sudden, Visio, VMware, and all of the Apps that were working out of my home directory - were really, really sluggish. Not unusable, but really long lags every time I tried to open a file. Turns out the VoIP phones were now acting as switches for all the Desktops, and my Desktop had been plugged into the phone, which, you guessed it - only had a 100 Mbit interface. Moving my desktop back to my (still lit) Gigabit port returned me to my regular speedy connection. Gigabit makes a big difference. I'd hate to throw around multi-100 megabyte files on 100 megabit network connections.

jsz0 14y ago

10Gbit is very commonly used in SANs now.

rdl 14y ago

The standard thing to do now is 2-4GE per server, link aggregated (possibly split across two switches for redundancy), using multiple 48-port GE switches with multiple 10GE uplinks, and then usually something like the Juniper $10-20k 40-port 10GE switches. Some specific servers like SANs go direct 10GE, particularly if you're going to have 1-2 SAN interfaces and a bunch of clients (so you can use the 10GE uplink ports for it). Enough things are CPU/memory/etc. bound that the "cheap" building block of a 1-2CPU server with 4GE, RAM, and some local disk is still more appropriate than buying a Xeon E7 with 10GE HBAs, in most cases. There might be an exception if you have per-host vs. per-core licensing for expensive stuff, or other artificial complaints, or a specific component (database?) which doesn't horizontally scale. I predict $5k 40-port 10GE switches and commodity server on-board 10GE NICs in a couple years, though. Although at that point, you need something crazy to uplink the switches. 40GE is emerging, or you could use a non-ethernet option. SANs are the big application for 10GE now since you can comfortably fit all the clients and servers on a standard 10GE switch and don't need to uplink most of the traffic. Part of the issue with the higher speed ethernets is lack of a copper cabling option, particularly one which works with existing cable plants. (less of a concern within racks).

fulafel 14y ago

one of the reasons is the stagnating internet connection speeds. In 13 years my net connection speed has only slightly more than doubled (10 to 24 Mbps). we should be getting Gbit internet connections and running 10 Gbit home/office networks.