10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) has been around for years, but high prices for both adaptors and switches have so far made it only accessible for deep-pocketed enterprise users. But with the Netgear XS708E, the jump is a lot more affordable and manageable, so upgrading the most congested parts of your business network to 10GbE is now a more realistic prospect.
With an eight-port switch such as the Netgear ProSafe XS708E, and the Thecus C10GTR add-on adaptor installed in your servers, you can be sure there'll be enough network bandwidth to supply hundreds of clients. The ProSafe XS708E is priced at £600 ($815, AU$935), and the Thecus C10GTR card at £300 ($392, AU$450).
Ten billion bits
Gigabit Ethernet, or 1000 Base-T, has been the standard in wired networking for the last decade, replacing 100 Base-T before it. Although you can still purchase add-on PCI Gigabit Ethernet cards, practically every motherboard now has a port built into it, making life a lot easier for IT departments.
With 10GbE, it's a return to that tradition, since very few motherboards and precisely zero laptops offer the faster networking port as standard. You can find it on a select few recent high-end motherboards from companies like Supermicro, which are aimed exclusively at server use, but it's a long way from becoming universal.
The 10GbE standard has been around since 2006, with quite a menu of different copper and optical connectors to choose from. But its wide acceptance depends on how easily it can be integrated with existing systems as much as its performance, given the billions of kilometres of RJ45 Ethernet cabling already entwined in office buildings around the globe.
The high cost of replacing these means it is not an option for most companies, so compatibility with current infrastructure is key to its success.
Cable requirements
Cabling requirements are slightly stricter than vanilla Gigabit Ethernet. Cat 6 can be used, with a maximum distance of 55m, while Cat 6a and Cat7 go up to 100m. Fibre, offered in a range of connectors including SFP, is used to connect switches over longer distances, connecting different buildings on a campus, for example. There's no speed advantage with fibre, a 10GbE connection is the same whether delivered over copper or optical cabling, but fibre is more resilient and less susceptible to interference.
While prices have fallen, there's still a huge gap between the affordability of Gigabit Ethernet and 10GbE. Upgrading every client machine in a larger office to 10GbE is prohibitively expensive, and totally unnecessary unless those systems are deployed in an environment with extremely high storage and bandwidth requirements, such as 4K media editing.
As it stands, 10GbE is now a great upgrade for the core servers on a network that come under the heaviest demand. Your mail server probably won't see a big performance improvement, but a file server definitely will, if it's under heavy load.
The Netgear ProSafe XS708E is an unmanaged 10GbE switch, with eight auto-sensing, auto-negotiating 10GbE RJ45 ports and a single SFP+ combo port for fibre connections. That means that when the SFP+ port is in use, one of the RJ45 ports is disabled.
In keeping with every other Netgear switch, it comes with a dark blue metal chassis. It's 1U high, with dimensions of 43mm x 330mm x 207mm, weighing 3.6kg. Although Netgear sent me a unit in a plain box rather than a full retail package, a rack mount kit is bundled with it.
There are LEDs galore on the front. There's one to indicate power status, one that lets you know about a fan failure, and each port has two to show link connection - green for 10GbE, amber for standard Gigabit speeds.
Netgear sells units with a larger number of ports too. You can get the XS712T, which has 12 RJ45 ports and two SFP+ ports, for example. The XS708E is powered by a Broadcom BCM56822 SoC, with 256MB of DDR2 memory, but the larger switch has a faster processor.
Fan noise
The unit is physically larger than a typical unmanaged desktop Gigabit switch, reflecting the higher demands of 10GbE. Whip the cover off and you'll see large heatsinks covering the interconnects, drawing heat to the metal chassis. It also has two 40mm fans that initially spin loudly when the switch is turned on, and continue to emit a noticeable hum when the unit is in use, quite clearly because the sheer volume of data and the additional power it requires will increase heat levels inside the unit. Not a problem in a server room, but not much fun for home users.
While the XS708E fits into the unmanaged switch category, Netgear offers some Windows desktop software to configure it. While it's not the most beautiful or user-friendly application, it works okay, automatically detecting any Netgear switch on the network, presumably via its MAC address.
There's no web interface to log into so this management has to be done from a Windows PC only. When you click on a device the software confronts you with a login screen, with the required password printed on the underside of the switch. Here, you can configure software functions more usually found on routers. VLAN support, QoS and denial of service protection are there.
The software can also indicate whether there's a problem with any of the ports, showing their link status at a glance. There's also a cable testing function, which could be very handy for use in a crowded server cabinet with hundreds of network cables and a port that's playing up.
One of the neatest software features is built-in Port Trunking, or link aggregation (LAG). Two physical Ethernet connections can be combined into one, for extra resilience and load sharing. However, the configuration options are rudimentary. You create a LAG group, and that's it. No other settings are available, which could be why we ran into issues when testing certain NAS units with it.
However, a small but particularly lovely aspect of the XS708E is a lifetime warranty, with next-day replacement. This applies not just to the US market, but a list of other European countries, including the UK, as well as Australia and New Zealand. Good one, Netgear!
Thecus C10GTR card
The Thecus C10GTR is a good example of how 10GbE hardware is becoming more affordable. It's a low-profile 10GbE card, with a standard RJ45 connector. It fits into a full-sized PCI-Express slot rather than a short X1 slot, since it requires at least four lanes (X4) to provide the required bandwidth.
It's really short, and space on its PCB is mostly occupied by the Tehuti TN4010 processor that does the grunt work blasting all those bits between your server and network.
In fact, it's so small, you might feel short-changed after handing over £300 ($392, AU$450) for it, but it's worth remembering what its job is - squeezing ten times as much data as Gigabit Ethernet down a single cable, reliably. Prices have come down considerably too, so while it's not cheap enough yet to be included on consumer motherboards, it's all headed in the right direction.
As one would expect, the C10GTR is fully backwards compatible with older networking standards that use RJ45 connectors.?
The card draws 4.95W when operating at 10GbE speeds, slightly less than some older cards which hover around 6W. This drops to 3.3W when used at Gigabit speed. Jumbo Frames of 16K are supported, as well as 802.3ad Link Aggregation.
There's also excellent driver support that reflects modern software environments. In addition to the typical offering of Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Storage Server 2012, and 2008 R2, there's Linux, VMWare 5.5 and Hyper-V support.
After a while using the XS708E in my office, I admit to becoming a bit irritated by its size and noise output. Having been spoilt for so long with gigabit Ethernet on the cheapest of routers, and desktop switches that can squeeze behind monitors, having such a bulky device to provide a mere eight ports is a reminder of how cutting edge and demanding 10GbE is.
I made a similar observation about the C10GTR add-on card. When I removed it from my PC, the main chip was extremely hot, not something I was expecting. While not quite as bad as some older generations of graphics card, which were literally hot enough to cook eggs, it was noticeable. 10GbE still has some way to go before fully maturing.
I set up a pair of PCs with C10GTRs installed in them, each connected to the XS708E via a standard piece of CAT6 Ethernet cable. I ran the open source tool iPerf to gauge performance.
I also used this exact setup in my testing of the Thecus N8810U-G eight-bay NAS, which I got results from by copying files directly to a local SSD array and to a RAM disk. In both cases, I couldn't squeeze full performance from the XS708E. The maximum theoretical speed of 10GbE is 10Gb/s, or 1.25GB/s. Over iPerf I hit 6.6Gb/s, while file transfers with the Thecus reached 642MB/s while writing, or 5.1Gb/s - just over half of the maximum available bandwidth. It seems software, OS settings and buffer sizes have some way to catch up before 10GbE is fully utilised.
However, this is still a truly impressive speed. The ability to throw almost an entire CD-ROM worth of data over a network every second is still a milestone that would have seemed like science fiction even quite recently.
We liked
The XS708E heralds an era where 10GbE is finally affordable, in relative terms at least. The required expenditure is now at the point where it's an affordable option for just about any business with high bandwidth requirements.
It's also fast. I'm certain it will go faster than my results show, but even the speeds I did see were faster than both single-port Gigabit Ethernet and combined, aggregated ports.
While I had little use for the SFP+ port in my office environment, that single addition will make it easier to deploy on large premises where 10GbE connectivity between departments positioned far from one another is needed.
And a lifetime warranty on an expensive piece of networking equipment is great to see.
We disliked
I've used this term before in reviews, and readers are quick to point out it's only relative, but yes, I found the XS708E a bit large. As I said earlier, when you're used to eight-port desktop switches that make no noise, and take up tiny amounts of space, the XS708E is a bit of a step change.
It was also noisy. The fans spin constantly - again, something you don't get with traditional desktop switches. This isn't a problem in a crowded server room, but it's a constant irritation when used in home offices.
The configuration software is rudimentary at best. There are no options to configure LAG connections, and it all feels a bit clunky. Netgear's good hardware products often seem let down by software and the XS708E seems to follow this trend.
And finally, I believe I speak for everyone by wishing that 10GbE hardware was even cheaper than it is now. While prices have dropped from the stratospheric levels they were once at, this is still not a mainstream product.
Final verdict
The XS708E is powerful and fast, but also large and noisy considering that it's just an eight-port switch. However, it is one of the lowest priced 10GbE options available, and it comes with a very nice lifetime warranty. The software is a weak point, though, and we still can't help but wish that prices of 10GbE hardware keep falling even more swiftly.
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