40G, 100G Ethernet still too pricey

Prices for 40G and 100G Ethernet need to come down before mainstream adoption can take off, was the consensus among experts at the Ethernet Technology Summit last week. At the moment, 40G Ethernet costs between six to seven times that of a 10G link, which keeps demand muted. And where 100G is concerned, at least one analyst says it will be 2015 before it is even priced for the market.

Participants at the event say that 40G Ethernet will eventually follow the price decline seen in 10G in the past. What is clear though is that there is pent-up demand for 40G speeds. Paul Hooper, chief marketing officer at Extreme Networks, says that this is true for the banking, healthcare and media markets.

At least one other category of companies will rejoice with the expected ratification of 40/100G Ethernet three or four months down the road. Donn Lee, an engineer at Facebook laments the problem faced by the fourth largest Web site in the world as a result of having to work with 10G switches. "We have to lash together huge arrays of 10G links to scale. Switches are not built for being in a fabric."

And while the bigger 10G Ethernet switches on the market can do upwards of 500 ports, their backbones only have sufficient capacity to run 25 percent of the ports at line rate. Utilizing them will only result in slow-downs on the ultra high-performance networks in Facebook.com.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at Computerworld
- check out the article at Network World 

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