10 Gig is enterprise-ready, but Cisco doesn't play well with others

Click on over to InfoWorld's 10-Gig switch-off special report, and you can read about our latest adventures testing 10-gig switching solutions at the Advanced Network Computing Lab, now nestled comfortably in its new digs at the University of Hawaii.

When we started planning for this test, we invited eight separate vendors, including 3Com, Enterasys, Extreme, Foundry, Force 10, HP, Nortel, and, of course, Cisco. We even got Microsoft and Sun to weigh in on their 10-gig operating system goals in two podcast interviews you can find right here.

I knew Extreme was in because those boys never run from a fight. They don't have to. HP was a surprise in that I hadn't thought of ProCurve and enterprise iron fitting in the same sentence, and the company was set to prove me wrong big-time.

Nortel politely ignored the invite as usual. Foundry and Force 10 both considered our test plan, but flat out said it wasn't enough of a “bit blaster” test. Both these companies have heavy carrier orientations when it comes to selling their 10-gig solutions, so what they want to show in a comparative is loads and loads of traffic blasting through the switch.

That's fair, but it's not what enterprises care about, which is InfoWorld's orientation. More important to an enterprise CIO is whether 10 Gig is really stable. Loads of man-hours spent tweaking switches, network cards, drivers, and the like only to get just the most out of a 10-Gig pipe simply isn't good enough. They want to know if the solution works. Do they get 10-Gig performance simply by powering up? After that, they care about easy integration into an existing architecture and day-to-day management tools, and they certainly have budget concerns. But most of all, they want to know what's in it for them besides just a really fat pipe. What's 10 Gig really good for that straight Gigabit Ethernet doesn't already give them?

Our previous 10-Gig test didn't have many good answers to any of these CIO-style questions. The technology was really a carrier class operation back then. Plus, the killer app hadn't yet fully emerged. To my mind, that killer app is a combination of VoIP and storage with computing clusters close behind. These are fully mature technologies in the case of the first two (soon for clusters), and 10 Gig is the pipe you want to run them.

SANs have obvious 10-Gig benefits, whereas VoIP finally achieves its promised purpose. Even today, many VoIP networks are still completely separate from their data counterparts because latency and capacity issues simply aren't yet there under gigabit networks with large call volumes. But this test clearly showed that today's 10-Gig solutions not only have plenty of pipe room to run your voice traffic over your data pipes, their management tools also have the smarts to make that operation doable for mere mortals rather than staff-toting VoIP Gandalfs.