A new report from Crehan Research forecasts that 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) will finally eclipse one Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE) by 2016 to become a majority of total shipments, which closely follows the mass adoption of servers based on Grantley, Intel’s latest micro-architecture platform.
“Although Romley and Nehalem, Intel’s prior two server platforms with new processor micro-architectures, were capable of driving enough bandwidth to warrant the incorporation of 10GbE networking, many supporting factors to push broader 10GbE adoption were not yet in place,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. “With the impending arrival of Grantley, these supporting factors – including broad market portfolios of lower-priced adapters and data center server-access switches, in addition to more compelling 10GBASE-T offerings – are falling into place to facilitate strong growth in the 10GbE server attach rate,” he said.
In its 4Q12 report, published in early 2013, Crehan Research identified three major stages of mainstream 10GbE server networking adoption, the first centering around blade servers and converged networking, the second around public cloud and hyper-scale data centers and the third around enterprise rack and tower servers. These three major stages are also correlated with the broad adoption of Intel’s micro-architecture server platform cycles, respectively, Nehalem, Romley and Grantley.
