Bechtolsheim: 10 GbE starting to go mainstream

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Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register has an article this morning that builds on a theme from last week, that of the rise of 10GbE. He interviewed Andy Bechtolsheim ahead of his talk at HPC on Wall Street today

What has Bechtolsheim fired up about 10GE is that it is starting to go mainstream. Even with the generic networking business expected to see an annual revenue decline on the order of 20 per cent in 2009, according to Bechtolsheim, the number of 10GE ports attached to servers are expected to grow from about 400,000 in 2008 (against new server shipments of around 8 million globally). Bechtolsheim predicts that the number will more than double each year over the three years so that by 2011, over 4 million 10GE server ports will ship in that year and, if you do the math, with about 7.5 million 10GE server ports installed by 2011. About 2 per cent of all servers in the installed base had 10GE ports in 2008, which will rise to about 5 per cent this year, hit maybe 10 per cent in 2010 and to about 25 per cent or more in 2011.

Among Bechtolsheim’s duties these days he is head of Arista Networks, the 10 GbE company that hopes to ride the adoption of the new technology to yet another business success. There is a lot of information on Arista, its strategy, and its technologies in The Register article.

What about Arista’s take on converged computing of the sort that IBM, Cisco, and others are rushing into?

If you are thinking that Arista might be tempted to jump into the server racket, forget it. Yes, Bechtolsheim has a background in servers at Sun. There’s his efforts to create a converged server and storage platform at Kealia that became the Constellation System. And Cisco is ramping up its “California” Unified Computing System. But Andy’s not going there.

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