10 GB Copper is dead

langenoir

We have most of our environment running on 10 GB copper and we have a couple IBM DS3524’s running iSCSI over 10 GB copper. So we have been looking at upgrading and even though I’m pretty sure I saw EMC and NetApp SANs running 10 GB copper, we were told by the vendor that the IBM SANs that are a direct upgrade of what we have according to IBM don’t use 10 GB copper, they use iSCSI over fiber with SFP connectors and that “They don’t come with 10 GB copper cards. 10 GB copper is dead.”

Is this guy full of it or does it seem like he has an angle here?

Lexluethar

Maybe i'm misunderstanding the question - are they saying there is not going to be any more 10GB copper cables / iscsi connectors? If that's what they are saying they are full of ****. We use both Fiber and 10GB copper cables in our datacenter - it's just a medium to transfer data. 10GB can't go as far and its less flexible (IE try wiring 40+ 10GB copper cables into one cabinet - it sucks) but it's WAY cheaper. Like fractions cheaper depending the SFP's you purchase for your fiber cables. I think Cisco certified SFP's run like 2,500 while a copper cable of same length is like 300.

Regardless, the connection is still iSCSI at the san and compute level.

Priston

10GB copper using twinax definitely isn't dead.

10GB copper using cat 6 is still new.

joelsfood

10gb infiniband would be my guess for 10gb copper taht's dead(well, dying). and I wouldn't argue

langenoir

Networking is not really my specialty, but they are specifically talking about 10 GB on BaseT / RJ45 connectors.

OctalDump

Yeah, I'm wondering what they mean by 10GB Copper. There's 10GB CU SFP+ cables, which seem to be fading in some cases for 10GB on UTP/STP Cat6/6a/7.

The idea, though, with SFP+ is that you can use copper or optical transceivers, or even transceivers for RJ-45. I'm guessing that you have the 81Y9613 10Gb card, which is RJ45 rather than SFP+. So my guess is that they are saying that SFP+ is your only option on the new boxes. Probably SFP+ is more desirable in higher end because of this flexibility to use multiple cable types.

The DS3524 also supports 1GB ethernet and 8GB fibre channel. Both can use copper or optical.

The other thing is that there has been a shift towards CNAs over NICs, even NICs with ToE and iSCSI. But I would have thought that a selling point for CNAs is the ability to reuse existing ethernet (copper) infrastructure, making RJ-45s more desirable.

Christian.

I don't think is dead, but fiber is taking over slowly. In the case of Checkpoint (firewalls), the new models support 10gb/s and 40gb/s over fiber. No sign that they will try to bring copper on anything over 1gb/s. They had time to design new copper cards in the older models, but that never happened. Everything is fiber on higher speeds.

OctalDump

Christian. wrote: »

I don't think is dead, but fiber is taking over slowly. In the case of Checkpoint (firewalls), the new models support 10gb/s and 40gb/s over fiber. No sign that they will try to bring copper on anything over 1gb/s. They had time to design new copper cards in the older models, but that never happened. Everything is fiber on higher speeds.

But are the connectors SPF+ or LC? Because SPF+ gives you options to go copper or fibre.

Christian.

OctalDump wrote: »

But are the connectors SPF+ or LC? Because SPF+ gives you options to go copper or fibre.

SFP, but they don't have copper as an option. You can probably put SFP from another vendor, but the point is they don't offer that for their products. You either use their fiber sfp, or install something they won't support or sell, having to get it from someone else. Seems to be similar to what langenoir mentioned in the beginning.

fmitawaps

How is Infiniband doing these days? I'm sue it is in older installations, but is it still being put in anything new? Have there been any speed upgrades in it?

OctalDump

fmitawaps wrote: »

How is Infiniband doing these days? I'm sue it is in older installations, but is it still being put in anything new? Have there been any speed upgrades in it?

Yes, Infiniband is still a thing - especially in HPC. It's under active development and the current single link speed is ~25Gbps, with .5 microsecond latency.

Depending on whose kool-aid you are drinking, Infiniband is either going to be relegated to an increasing fringe of HPC applications as Ethernet catches up and exceeds "acceptable", or is going to supplant Ethernet as the interconnect of choice not just in datacentre applications but in all applications.

OctalDump

Christian. wrote: »

SFP, but they don't have copper as an option. You can probably put SFP from another vendor, but the point is they don't offer that for their products. You either use their fiber sfp, or install something they won't support or sell, having to get it from someone else. Seems to be similar to what langenoir mentioned in the beginning.

Ah, yeah, I'm so used to just doing what works in the lab that I'm starting to forget that vendors refuse to support some things, and businesses would rather spend the extra few thousand than risk the few 10,000's or 100,000s of things going pear shaped because some tech got too clever.

I say this as I am in the process of transplanting firmware across fibre channel HBAs to get them to work on less forgiving platforms - something I probably wouldn't even suggest in a production environment - but is interesting to play with.

apr911

I dont think 10GB copper is dead on the networking side. Maybe I just didnt see it before now and my assessment is wrong but I've seen 10GB Fiber for a while now while there hasn't been a lot of things using 10GB Copper until more recently.

That being said, network connectivity and storage connectivity are 2 different things. If you're looking for a SAN, chances are you're going to be on fibrechannel. There's less overhead associated with Fibrechannel vs iSCSI over TCP/Ethernet and fibrechannel is further designed to be lossless.

There's a recent discussion about the differences between a NIC with iSCSI and an HBA FibreChannel. It's a great post that gets into more details about the different storage types and connecting to them.
http://www.techexams.net/forums/off-topic/119475-host-bus-adapter-hba-clarity.html