Worldwide chip manufacturers are working their way to the new Ethernet standard specifications set, that is supposed to bring dazzling Internet speeds of up to 10 Gbps. NetXen and ServerEngines, two integrated circuitry manufacturers are currently developing a new wave of 0Gbit/second Ethernet silicon that supports both PCI-Express 2.0 links for increased bandwidth, and virtualization capabilities.

Server manufacturers are to take the greatest advantage of the new technology. They will be able to implement a whole new array of services over the old Ethernet infrastructure (such as networking, storage and clustering features), into systems that can host multiple sessions at once due to virtualization technology. The technology might seem promising, but there is an enormous amount of work until it is ready.

"So far no one has gotten all the pieces of the puzzle together yet," said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group. This means that the industry lacks a chip to mix all the necessary ingredients for faster speeds and virtualization support. For instance, there is no processor to deliver TCP offload engines (TOEs), and at the same time, to offer the benefits of virtualized environments.

However, there are some promising advancements that are slated for demonstration this year, but they will have to face the demands of another emerging standard to allow Fibre Channel to run storage traffic over Ethernet.

"I don't know if we will get to one chip with everything in it, but to flesh out this converged fabric concept you need to get as much capability out there as possible, and we are still early in this effort," said Michael Krause, an interconnect specialist in the PC server group at Hewlett-Packard. "It's a longer period of time before you get all this in the chips in a way that's cost and power efficient," he said.

NetXen, for instance, will be delaying its chip until autumn, in order to wait for Intel's upcoming 45-nanometer Nehalem server processor.