According to PHY manufacturer Aquantia, 95% of all the major switch vendors now have a 10GBASE-T offering. These switches increase bandwidth and throughput in data centers and are significantly less power than the equivalent 10ea 1GbE ports. Power is now in line with fiber, providing a lower cost option that supports 1 an 10 GbE out of the same hardware. This provides additional savings for data centers. Intel (R) began shipping 10GBASE-T native on motherboards in 2011.

For other benefits of 10GBASE-T including port savings and fewer switch purchases, please see Siemon whitepapers.

Siemon DC Design services will be happy to provide assistance on data center layout options to help you utilize this new technology. It is important to remember that with current shipping hardware, approximately 1-1.5 Watts per port can be saved using 6A or 7A cabling under 30m. The right design can further your power savings while upgrading network links to support virtualization, cloud computing, and other high bandwidth applications.

When you put 10GBASE-T in the switch to server links, the backplane also needs to improve.  While some manufacturers suggest using  multiple 10GbE uplinks, some also use QSFP assemblies for 40GbE, and some are already supporting 100GbE.   Visit Siemon SIS for supporting direct connect products.