10Gb Ethernet

10 Gigabit Ethernet or 10GE or 10GbE or 10 GigE standard was first published in 2002 as IEEE Std 802.3ae-2002 and is the fastest of the Ethernet standards. It defines a version of Ethernet with a nominal data rate of 10 Gbit/s, ten times as fast as Gigabit Ethernet.

10 Gigabit Ethernet standard encompasses a number of different physical layer (PHY) standards. As of 2008 10 Gigabit Ethernetwas seen as an emerging technology with only 1 million ports shipped in 2007. A networking device may support different PHY types by means of pluggable PHY modules. 10 Gigabit Ethernet supports only full duplex links which can be connected by switches.

10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) has moved past the early adoption stage and is rapidly becoming the mainstay for backbones within enterprise and service provider networks. The escalating deployments of multi-core processor-based servers and demanding applications such as high performance computing (HPC), database clusters, and video on demand are driving the need for 10GbE connections.