As a culture we've become conditioned to think that bigger is not always better. Big cars guzzle gas and pollute the air! Big food portions clog your arteries! Big business hurts the "little guy!" This line of thought is especially true when it comes to technology. Just look at Moore's Law and the size of the wildly popular (and tiny) iPhone for proof of that. Metcalfe's Law (named for the co-inventor of Ethernet), however, tells us that the bigger network, the more useful it is. And besides, all those bits from those millions of tiny devices can really add up.

So what's all this talk about 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) networks, or "super networks," as we like to call them at McAfee? Are they really all that?

Yes, and more.

While super-sizing your fries certainly isn't good for your health and won't help you win any foot races, upgrading to a 10GbE network will make your organization leaner and faster than ever before. At 10 times the overall throughput of traditional 1-Gigabit Ethernet networks, 10GbE is a major leap forward in infrastructure technology, and adoption is nearly doubling each year. Leading the way are large enterprises and industries with ever-expanding needs for bandwidth, not to mention parts of or entire governments looking to upgrade their network backbone (just look at Japan, Singapore and South Korea, as well as several of our own government's networks).

In addition to allowing IT teams to streamline and simplify operations by eliminating the need for cumbersome channelized Ethernet technologies, 10GbE networks dramatically speed up the performance of a new breed of bandwidth-heavy applications. Following in the early footsteps of voice-over-IP (VoIP) services from a few years back, key industries and applications now driving 10GbE adoption forward include broadcast (video), education (multi-institution connectivity to a public backbone), financial services (storage) and network service providers (e.g. BT, AT&T). Enterprises are also using 10GbE for storage and to speed up corporate network traffic and internal applications such as CRM, ERP and collaboration tools. To perform well, these applications simply demand more bandwidth than existing 1Gb networks can provide, and 10GbE gives it to them—with performance to spare.

10GbE and security
What are the security implications of 10GbE? The bottom line is that in any major infrastructure upgrade there are security risks that must be addressed. For most organizations, the move to 10GbE is just a matter of time. Their backbones have already broken through the 1Gbps barrier. At this stage in the 10GbE game, most of the deployment is still at the data center and backbone levels: the most critical network assets in the enterprise. For secure environments this means not only upgrading the infrastructure but the network security hardware as well. So it's important to make sure you're not putting the cart ahead of the horse by pursuing a network upgrade that your existing security vendor can’t protect. Just because the network is faster doesn't mean that it should be any less secure.

There are three critical considerations when upgrading a network security solution to 10GbE: support for legacy 1GigE networks, throughput capacity for 10Gbps performance, and comprehensive security enforcement. Only recently (McAfee announced at InterOp that its IntruShield 10-Gigabit Ethernet platforms would be available in the second half of 2007) has the industry seen network security platforms that could address all three. It is also worth noting that a network upgrade should not mean that the organization's approach to security has to change. An ideal 10GbE network security solution would seamlessly interoperate with the prior network security solutions and impose no changes in the organization's security management process. It should simply be another point of enforcement in the shiny new 10GbE network.

Every organization is in some phase of upgrading its network at any moment in time, and as new applications emerge with seemingly insatiable needs for bandwidth, network technology will continue to evolve along with them. People are naturally going to choose the fastest solutions available, and for now, 10GbE is the answer. It's a fair assumption that all security vendors are eventually going to move in the direction of offering protection for 10GbE networks, but some are much further ahead than others.

So go ahead and super-size. In the case of the network, "bigger" is definitely better (as long as you keep it secure).