Solarflare News Desk

Data Center Market to Evolve in 2009, Witnessing Volume Adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Solarflare CTOs share insight on emerging trends, predicting a shift in infrastructure investment to meet growing demands

Irvine, CA - February 04, 2009

The continued adoption of virtualization and cloud computing is pushing the widespread adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, according to Solarflare Communications, leading provider of standards-compliant 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) silicon. The company’s two CTOs, George Zimmerman and Steve Pope, share their predictions on technology trends in 2009, staking a claim that big data center players and Asian manufacturers will hold a strong role in bringing to market 10GbE products. An increased focus on energy efficiency and cost savings will also play a role in the implementation of 10GBASE-T. Specifically, Zimmerman and Pope see:

1. CIOs will respond to the economic downturn by focusing core spending on mature and proven technology, which will support measureable improvements in areas of application performance and convergence, and enable increasing levels of virtual business activities. Investment in new multi-core CPUs and server virtualization will be increasingly leveraged through the deployment of low cost iSCSI storage. This trend, along with continued adoption of cloud computing and Web 2.0 applications, will drive demand for 10GbE. Enterprises and data centers are looking for cost-effective ways to upgrade their infrastructure to handle these advanced applications, while utilizing existing infrastructure. By mid-2009, there will be several 10GBASE-T switch and server adapter products on the market that will enable incremental bandwidth upgrades using 10GbE over installed copper cabling.

2. The Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) in Asia played largely a silent role in the growth of the enterprise and data center network industry in 2008. This will change due to increasing globalization and outsourcing. Given the economic climate, it is likely the percentage of switch, server and server adapter products being designed, engineered and manufactured in Taiwan and China will increase.

3. As energy efficiency continues to be top-of-mind, standards initiatives, such as the IEEE P802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet, will introduce ways to map power consumption to usage and network loads. Additional power savings modes will be incorporated at both the component level and in end-user products. The IEEE P802.3az task force is on target to ratify requirements in the second half of 2010, shaping the way components operate and are designed.

4. Current blade architectures, while driving some cost and efficiency savings, will be taken to new levels of compute density and power efficiency through continued integration and the continued removal of legacy subsystems from the platform architecture. With the introduction of Nehalem, all major CPU vendors have now firmly adopted integrated memory controllers with a multi-core NUMA architecture. In the future, look to CPU real-estate being dedicated to application-specific functions and other techniques, such as individual core power scaling, being adopted and integrated into operating systems. Data centers that have already moved to a tiered storage architecture such as iSCSI, may see the opportunity of further reducing energy consumption and increasing compute density by entirely removing rotating media from all other compute tiers as the cost of solid state storage continues to fall.

Executive quote

“Large, tier-one OEMs and ODMs are making a push toward creating a new data center infrastructure vision and we will see this come to fruition in 2009,” said Pope. “Some players will bypass traditional server customers to sell servers directly through leading data center players. Other will look to form Ethernet partner / channel deals.”

“By the end of 2009, more than 50% of new data centers will have Category 6A or better cabling installed,” said Zimmerman. “This signals to OEMs and ODMs that their customers are ready for mainstream 10GBASE-T, as the most cost-effective, high-performance networking solution needed in today’s enterprise. While we may see conversations hedging toward 40GbE and 100GbE around the end of the year, 10GbE is ready now and poised for volume adoption.”

Technical specifications

About Solarflare 10 Gigabit Products
Solarflare designs and develops the highest-performing, lowest-power, standards-compliant 10GbE controllers and 10GBASE-T transceivers on the market. Optimized for all key virtualization platforms including Citrix XenEnterprise, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX server, Solarflare’s Solarstorm® Ethernet controller consumes less than 1.9 watts at full line-rate performance delivering the optimal balance in performance and power efficiency. Solarflare’s 10Xpress® 10GBASE-T PHY supports distances of greater than 100 meters on UTP Category 6A cabling, 100 meters on STP Category 6, 55 meters on UTP Category 6, and 45 meters on UTP Category 5E cabling. When combined on a server adapter, Solarflare’s 10Xpress 10GBASE-T PHY and Solarstorm 10GbE controller deliver 10 times the performance of a 1 Gigabit NIC at half the power consumption of previous 10GbE server adapters. For additional product information and pricing, send a request to productinfo@solarflare.com.

About the company

About Solarflare Communications, Inc.
Solarflare Communications is a semiconductor company delivering the next level of high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE). As the leading provider of standards-compliant 10GbE silicon, Solarflare delivers robust and power-efficient solutions that are cost effective and easy to deploy. Now real and ready for primetime, Solarflare 10 Gigabit Ethernet makes possible next-generation applications such as streaming rich media, Web 2.0, server virtualization and network convergence. Solarflare is working with key industry partners and customers to ensure interoperability and drive a complete 10GBASE-T ecosystem. Solarflare has announced relationships with Accton, Citrix, Delta, Ixia, Panduit, SMC, and VMware. The privately held company is headquartered in Irvine, Calif. with a development center in Cambridge, UK.

Contact details

Amy Robinson / Katie Eakins
LEWIS PR for Solarflare
619-677-2700
solarflare@lewispr.com

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