The Apple Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapter really is a full PCI express device, complete with its own Ethernet controller! This is easily the smallest and cheapest Thunderbolt peripheral to date, and suggests a bright future for similar devices in the future.
gigabit Ethernet
Will Apple Call Light Peak “Thunderbolt”?
Intel has been incredibly tight-lipped about Light Peak. Although I’ve been hounding my contacts inside the company for months, no one has spilled the beans about anything. All I know about Light Peak I learned on the Internet, as they say. Now comes another bombshell: Apple will introduce Light Peak-equipped MacBook Pros tomorrow (February 24) with “Thunderbolt”, a high-speed I/O port!
The Best Network Card For VMware ESX Home Lab Machines
I’m building a home/lab server to run a variety of workloads, but VMware ESX is chief among these. Sadly, VMware ESX is especially picky about network interface cards (NICs): Although many are supported, most are intended for servers and thus very expensive and difficult to find at retail. So I set out browsing through the VMware ESX HCL, Newegg, and Amazon to find the best network card for my home lab machine. Here’s what I’ve found out so far.
What If Light Peak Was Electrical Rather Than Optical?
As I considered the possibilities of the new Apple/Intel interconnect technology known as Light Peak, an odd parallel with 10 Gb Ethernet popped into my head. Much of the confusion around Light Peak revolves around connectors, power conduction, and backward-compatibility. Then, like the Grinch, I thought of something I hadn’t before: Why use optical at all? 10 GBASE-T does just fine over twisted pair, and short interconnect distances would reduce power draw to reasonable levels. What if Light Peak was electrical rather than optical?
The FCoTR Phenomenon Exposes the Weaknesses in Ethernet
The buzz about Fibre Channel over Token Ring has built rapidly over the last week. Industry experts like Greg Ferro, Denton Gentry, and Joe Onisick have weighed in, and the Packet Pushers Podcast featured the news in show 12, “Get on the Ring!” Some have called out FCoTR as a foolish hoax, but the FCoTR phenomenon is not foolish. Indeed, FCoTR gives everyone in the industry the chance to reevaluate the current state of the art and has exposed real weaknesses in the Ethernet-centric future of the data center.
