10Gbps: Boost Your Networks

The Dark Lord of Network Operations, Tim Armstrong, is back again – this time to perform his occult arts on your Cat6 cables. Bring on the lasers!

- Tim Armstrong

It seems like we can’t go a week right now without hearing about a new 10Gbps-capable devices – from popular NAS appliances (such as the DS1817 reviewed in LXF228) to Asus entering the Ethernet market with a 10GbE aka 10G desktop switch, which looks more like part of a high end audio system than a network switch. Even though we’ve

The US-16-XG brings style, simplicity, and speed to your network core.been hearing similar sentiments since Netgear’s XS708E a few years back, 10G may finally be ready for Consumer and SoHo networks. We’re going to cut through the marketing noise and take a look at how you can upgrade a small to midsize office without breaking the bank.

Who needs it?

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of how to select your hardware and lay out your network, it’s perhaps cogent to discuss who can really benefit from 10G networking, and why? As it stands, new media companies are really the ones that get the most out of the upgrade today. This isn’t to say others can’t benefit from it – they certainly can – but there is something really tangible about more than one person being able to edit raw 4K footage from a NAS at the same time.

For example, a small studio or a YouTube channel with two or three editors, rolling out one to two 4K videos a week, is already a prime case for the upgrade; but it might only make sense for a more traditional office environment like an accountant’s office, a law firm or a print media company to upgrade when it has nearly a hundred workstations. On the surface, then, it might seem as though new media companies are the exception, as if they are the only ones 10G office networks make sense for at the moment, but this is one of the biggest misconceptions about 10G networks.