On 8/8/24 03:37, William Herrin wrote:
Hi Eric, All of these are excellent reasons why the DC -operator- should want to use fiber in 10GE links. The question was: why does a DC -customer- want 40 gigs of specifically fiber optic connections in what is otherwise a minimum server configuration, the sort that easily fits in 1U. The Linux network stack would struggle to even drive 40 gigs; you'd be into very custom network software built with something like DPDK but the guy hasn't placed any conditions on the available network infrastructure and connectivity except that it offer 4x 10gig fiber optic ethernet. That's weird.
"Weird" is not what I would use to describe it. Unusual, perhaps. I mean, vendors are producing optical NIC's for servers.
I'm aware of some deployments that struggled with availability of copper-based switches and NIC's 2020/2021, but SFP28 was available, so they moved to that. Again, a special case.
Copper will continue to dominate the server market for a while yet. Mark.
