What's the point of Cat6 if it only does 1gig like Cat5e?

[imagoon]

spikespiegal, your personal example may serve you well. In small VMware clusters you can often do ok with gig and a couple of hosts, 15-20 and vmotion on Gig. I have no problem doing that kind of stuff on my test environment. However when you have 1 host with 8 sockets and 6 cpu/s socket + few hundred gig of RAM you need 10GIG performance even in vmotion. If you need to move 512GB of RAM over to another machine (host failed or is going to maintenance mode) you need (in theory, no overhead included) 8.2 seconds per gig of RAM moved on a 1 gig connection. You are pushing nearly 70 minutes to vmotion that host. You may not have that time in an HA event. (vmotion is a good example lots of time because there is a lot of RAM to network to RAM movement so disk means nothing) You won't see this at the small and even medium level business. Data centers however do this regularly. 10gig would do the entire transfer in 7 minutes.

Other places I have seen it is in the financial markets moving stock symbols around.

 

[Fayd]

2000: Gigabit network interfaces on higher end consumer machines
2009: Gigabit networks in the home are actually not that uncommon

That progression doesn't seem that fast to me.

Fast forward...

2011: No large volume consumer machines have 10 GigE.

Tell me how 10 GigE networks are going to be common in the home by 2012-2014 again? Yeah, 10 GigE in the home WILL HAPPEN. It just won't be common in 1-3 years from now.

internal networks installed in homes in 2000 are still existant. just because you don't expect to cap out the bandwidth available on the cable in the next few years doesn't mean you shouldn't install the best cable reasonably available. it costs a lot of money to restring cable.

as an example... when this house was wired for ethernet in 1999-200ish, cat5e had come out and was fairly new. IE, there was a price difference between it and cat5. my father decided that there would never be any need for gigabit in a residential setting, and opted for the cheaper cat5.

while gigabit over copper IS possible over cat5, it's severely restricted by crosstalk due to (comparatively) crappy cables. a similar setup on cat5e would net me around 70+ MB/s throughput, the best i can achieve here is around 35-40 MB/s.

for a minor cost savings back then, we've cut potential bandwidth now to half of what it could be. a poor choice of actions.