Cisco still has time to cram in a product announcement. Foundry's FES-X boxes won't be available until April, and, while Extreme's Summit 400 began shipments at the end of February, the 10-Gbit/s optics for the box won't ship until later this month.
The primary application for 10-Gbit/s Ethernet is to aggregate multiple Gigabit Ethernet feeds for forwarding deeper into the network. So far, switch owners have had to do this aggregation by having ports share a 1-Gbit/s uplink, an oversubscription technique that works but that gets risky if traffic gets heavy.
The assumption is that as Gigabit Ethernet catches on, those 1-Gbit/s uplinks will get overwhelmed, forcing customers to buy more equipment. "Depending on how they're using [a switch], they may need to double the number of modules" to get enough uplink bandwidth, says Bob Schiff, director of marketing for Foundry's enterprise business unit.
Some oversubscription is normal for Ethernet, because not every port is carrying its maximum traffic flow all the time. Just look at the new Extreme and Foundry boxes: 48 ports of Gigabit Ethernet crammed into the 20-Gbit/s output offered by two 10-Gbit/s Ethernet ports. "Historical oversubscription ratios have been in that ballpark," says Varun Nagaraj, vice president of product management for Extreme.
For now, it appears 10-Gbit/s Ethernet isn't urgently needed in most enterprises and data centers, but it's probably a requirement on buyers' checklists. "I don't think customers are experiencing a great deal of traffic congestion, but I think they're more comfortable buying something that's upgradeable over the long term," Suppiger says.
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