ASUS Bets on Domestic 10 Gbps Ethernet with Two New Consumer-Grade Products

[btarunr]

With 802.11ac and WLAN standards getting faster by the day, wired Ethernet is going the way of the dinosaur, at least in case of home (domestic) markets. ASUS is betting against this trend, and believes that if marketed properly, there's scope for 10 Gbps Ethernet (802.3ae-2002) to dominate domestic markets such as high-end gaming networks and home-studios. To this effect, the company launched two new products styled for the home - the XG-U2008 switch, and the ROG-10G add-on 10 Gbps Ethernet card included with certain ROG motherboards, which could probably also be sold separately.

The XG-U2008 is an unmanaged or plug-n-play 10-port switch with two 10 GbE ports, and eight 1 GbE ports. In full-duplex mode, this works out to 20 Gbps per 10 GbE port; and 2 Gbps per 1 GbE port. This should let you plug-in NAS servers with 10 GbE to one of the ports, your desktop to the other, and a WLAN router or other desktops to the 1 GbE ports. The ROG-10G card, on the other hand, sits across a PCI-Express gen 2.0 x4 host interface, and features a Tehuti Networks TN9710-class single-port 10 GbE controller. It comes included with the Maximus VIII Extreme/Assembly motherboard for now, although one can't discount the possibility of ASUS selling it separately.



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[Frick]

No idea about Tehuti Networks, but nice to see in any case!

 

[Disparia]

The 8+2 approach is a good start. Everyone in my house needs access to the home server, but I'm the only one that would benefit from a faster connection.

For those with a CAT5e wired home or wouldn't see value from a 10Gb setup, we should be seeing 2.5Gb and 5Gb options next year. Some situations may benefit when everyone is at 2.5Gb instead of mixed speeds.

 

[cyneater]

don't you need cat 7 / cat 8 Ethernet cabling to take full advantage of 10Gpbs

 

[nickbaldwin86]

don't you need cat 7 / cat 8 Ethernet cabling to take full advantage of 10Gpbs

CAT 6 is all that is needed. and is now a standard. any installer that is still using CAT 5e should be retired or fired (as long as you keep it under 50m or 160FT)

CAT 6A or better would be needed for greater lengths

 

[Fx]

It is a start, but it still falls way short. I would be far more interested if it had four 10 Gbps ports.

 

[evernessince]

Wired ethernet going the way of the dinosaur? Yeah, I don't think so. Any environment requiring low latency and minimal issues will always used wired.

 

[FR@NK]

I wonder if it even has a non blocking backplane. I remember when Gigabit became popular and most "Consumer-Grade" units didnt.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Make it 8-10 10GbE ports and we have a deal.

 

[Prima.Vera]

don't you need cat 7 / cat 8 Ethernet cabling to take full advantage of 10Gpbs

Cat 6A would be ideal, but very expensive and hard to find.

 

[TheGuruStud]

It's about time. Gigabit has been mainstream for 12 yrs at least.

 

[Prima.Vera]

It's about time. Gigabit has been mainstream for 12 yrs at least.

Easy explanation. Even 1Gbit/s is faster than most HDD can transfer. You need a very fast PCI-ex SSD in order to fully utilize the 10Gbps speed.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Actually most high capacity HDDs can transfer more than 200 MB/s which is enough to saturate a GbE link. The 1.25 GB/s capacity of 10 GbE is much harder to fill. That said, the switching capacity of switches and hardware has to be enormous. Assuming the packets are normal (not Jumbo), it would take a minimum of 833,334 packets per second to saturate that capacity. To put that into a context, a low end commercial router is only capable of switching 1,000,000 packets per second. This kind of bit rate doesn't just require better storage hardware, it requires better cables, better switches, and better routers. This is why it is taking so long for 10 GbE to catch on. 100 GbE is pretty much unfathomable at this point, especially in a residential setting.

 

[Ubersonic]

Meh, sounds cool but I don't need to care for a few years, it's not going to make my 80MB VDSL speed up or make things stream from my NAS faster (though it will knock a few seconds off transferring files to the NAS).

don't you need cat 7 / cat 8 Ethernet cabling to take full advantage of 10Gpbs

No, but something worth pointing out is that there is a difference between what is certified and what is needed, I.E according to the specs you can use the following cables/speeds:

Cat5: 10/100
Cat5e: 10/100/1000
Cat6: 10/100/1000
Cat6a: 10/100/1000/10000

However all those certifications are at a 100m cable length, which is ridiculous in consumer (home) grade installations, in reality there is crossover, Cat5 will happily do 1GB just not over the full 100m, Cat6 will happily do 10GB just not over the full 100m, etc. You can even get 10GB running fine over Cat5e if you're having a LAN party in a single room with patch cables or something.

 

[Octavean]

It looks like an interesting product and at a decent price despite its limitations (only two 10GbE ports).

I wouldn't mind playing with it but rather then spend the ~$250 on the Asus XG-U2008 I would simply use SFP+ 10GbE direct connect between two servers and connect the clients with 1GbE. Such a configuration should yield similar performance. It would be nice to have 10GbE for all connected devices but I only really benefit from it when transferring a large amount of data and that would be from server to server (RAID arrays / possibly SSD cache).

A set of Mollanox Connectx PCIe 10GbE cards would probably be about ~$40 USD. Add a SFP+ to SFP+ DAC (2 meters) and it could be as low as about ~$60 USD.

It could get messy if you wanted to add more then the two 10GbE connection (and harder to troubleshoot as you are approaching antiquated token ring networks with such a setup) but at least its an option to do so and it would still be cheaper then the Asus XG-U2008.

 

[Brusfantomet]

Not a big fan of Asus products, but this is nice. No word on pricing i guess.

Actually most high capacity HDDs can transfer more than 200 MB/s which is enough to saturate a GbE link.

Then add some of those in a RAID 5 array and you quickly start seeing some nice improvements over GbE.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Category 7 is getting skipped like Category 4 (because not backwards compatible). Category 8 cables (40 GbE) are pretty much defined (1600 MHz, 100m) but the transceivers aren't yet. Once the 40 GbE transceiver specification is finalized, the Category 8 cable requirements will be finalized.

 

[Octavean]

Not a big fan of Asus products, but this is nice. No word on pricing i guess.



Then add some of those in a RAID 5 array and you quickly start seeing some nice improvements over GbE.

The Asus XG-U2008 is available now from e-tailers like Newegg and Amazon for about ~$250 USD.

I have yet to see the Asus ROG-10G NIC anywhere though and who knows what price they will demand. Two Asus ROG-10G NIC's could cost as much or more then the Asus XG-U2008 switch itself. If money is no object (or less of an issue) then something like the Netgear ProSAFE XS708E 8-Port 10G Ethernet Switch or 24 port version would be preferable to this. However, if cost is a concern then the SFP+ to SFP+ DAC solution suggested earlier would likely be a lot more cost effective and have similar performance.