What is 25gb ethernet good for? [closed]
I've come across listings for 25gb NIC cards online, from various companies including Intel, Mellanox, and Broadcom. Can someone explain what these are for? Clearly the bandwidth these cards can support is an order of magnitude higher than what your ISP provides. I know these cards are used to quickly transfer data between servers in a server room, but other than that I don't see any real application. Are there scientific instruments which generate a lot of data and support a 25gb interface?
It's quite useful for:
- backend of "Internet of the Things" (where all data is received)
- Distributed Storage system like CEPH/Gluster/Lustre
- Firewall/Router system (some Linuxes/BSDs are used for that purpose)
- Streaming Servers
These cards would more commonly be used in servers in data centers that have higher bandwidth connections to the internet. They can also be used in corporate data centers where bandwidth is again higher than residential internet connections.
I know these cards are used to quickly transfer data between servers in a server room, but other than that I don't see any real application
Since you ask the question on serverfault.com, servers in datacenters are everybody's focus. Anyway, you answered your question. What other information you need?
In addition to the use cases that were already mentioned, let me add clouds. A lot of data is transferred between hypervisor hosts and their storage providers, or between hypervisor hosts for migration of virtual machines.