With a 17 year focus on extreme low-latency networking we've gotten pretty good at shaving microseconds from every stage in the network pipeline.  Myricom has extended it's DBL2 for Windows Beta this week which provides sub 5 microsecond latency for both UDP and TCP transactions for the financial trading market (HFTs). DBL is Myricom's most popular low-latency driver, and this is the first time Windows users have been offered a low latency solution that is in the single digit microseconds. If low-latency on Windows is important to your business drop me a line, and I'll hook you up.

In February 2006 I helped coordinated Myricom's first shipment of 10GbE adapters to our largest OEM customer, so over the past five years I've picked up a bit about the industry.  Today most people use  fiber for 10GbE.  Recent advances in technology will usher in the emergence of 10GbE over standard Cat5 cable, the most popular network cable in the world, for runs up to 40 meters.  If you spring for the more pricey Cat6 cable you'll be able to reach 100 meters.  It will be at this point that 10GbE will be ready for mass adoption.  So why has it taken five years?  It's a combination of both physics and computing power.  Cat5 & 6 cable is four pairs of copper wire wrapped around each other.  At 10GbE speeds this is four 3.125Ghz antennas intertwined.  The ratio of signal to noise is extremely lopsided so at each end of the wire a sophisticated digital signal processor (DSP) is employed to locate the signal in the cacophony of noise.  Until recently these DSPs were very power hungry, not anymore.  This industry is approaching an inflection point, stay tuned...