Stepping Up To 10G

The big names such as Cisco Systems and Foundry Networks have been delivering 10G products for years, but there has still been ample room for newcomers to enter the market, despite the slow rate of 10G adoption over the past five years.

What has attracted new vendors to the space is the simple fact that price-per-port declines are making the technology more affordable for businesses. Add to that the rapid adoption of new on-demand technologies such as VoIP and video and the need for more bandwidth becomes readily apparent.

But many solution providers still wonder: What makes one vendor different from another in the 10G space? While 10G has not approached commodity status as of yet, price per port may very well be the answer to that query.

There is no denying that as the vendor list grows, competition drives prices lower. That has a direct impact on margins and profits associated with selling the hardware. As availability and adoption scales up for 10G, solution providers will need to shift their focus from margins to service opportunities and design services.

A vendor's ability to support that shift will become the deciding factor in how most solution providers will choose their partner. Another critical element for solution providers will be technical support and product MTBF (mean time between failure). After all, 10G products will be deployed into the most critical of network areas where downtime must be completely avoided.

Whether it's a product's failover capabilities, a vendor's rapid replacement program or failure mitigation technologies, solution providers will have to balance cost against uptime promises to make a final decision on selecting a vendor.

For most VARs, the biggest promise in the 10G arena is the arrival of 10G over copper, which removes the complexity and costs associated with traditional 10G fiber-based solutions and reduces both deployment and price-per-port costs. Combining copper 10G with IP storage technologies such as iSCSI will create one of the biggest opportunities for VARs looking to profit from 10G Ethernet, along with business-continuity, disaster-recovery and virtualization solutions.