Video Drives 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adoption

The growth of Internet video is driving broader adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet to speed delivery of huge files across networks. That's the news from Equinix, which said it has seen strong growth in the sale of 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports to connect networks within its data centers. VeriSign and Yahoo are among the customers who moved to 10 Gig connectivity in the third quarter.

"There is no question that video is driving a fair amount of growth," said Equinix chief business officer Margie Backaus. "As these file sizes continue to grow, we see a lot of upgrades to 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. We have 36 10GigE ports right now, which is significantly outpacing what we had expected, and is being specifically driven by video."

10 Gigabit Ethernet offers data speeds up to 10 billion bits per second , and offers a more efficient and less expensive approach to moving data on backbone connections between networks.

Last week researchers from Purdue used a 10-gigabit network to deliver what is being described as the largest uncompressed video streamed over the Internet. The clip of a medical procedure - with a file size equivalent to 12 DVDs - was streamed in two in just two minutes.

At the same conference (SuperComputing 06) a separate team of researchers spliced ten 10 Gigabit streams to deliver a 100 Gigabit Ethernet signal, The splicing of the signal is based on a packet-reordering algorithm developed at the University of California at Santa Cruz, which demonstrated the technology with partners Infinera, Level 3 and the Internet 2 consortium.

Neither of those projects won the Bandwidth Challenge at SuperComputing 06, an honor that went to the National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose demonstration transfered data at a peak data rate of 9.18 gigbits per second over a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet link. "The Bandwidth Challenge this year really demonstrated that 10 Gb/s data transfer is becoming feasible without having to spend millions of dollars to fully utilize the network," said Yunhong Gu, Ph.D., a research scientist at trhe center.