Gigabit Ethernet? Bah! I need REAL speed!

Although it actually sounds pretty fast, when you actually start benchmarking it, Gigabit Ethernet isn’t quite as good a solution as you’d think. As more and more commercial deployments move to using SANs and NAS for online storage and backups it’s increasingly easy to saturate existing LANs.

One possible solution as people start to look at 10 and 100Gbps networks is FireEngine (PDF), a set of architecture changes and improvements for Solaris 10. The white-paper linked to above provides a nice overview on what they’ve changed and some estimated (almost all benchmarks are lies ;)) performance improvements; all I need now are a couple of 10Gbps NICs!