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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?

Gautam Goel
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    Note that almost all bandwidth increases also directly map to a latency decrease - the same 1MiB image is transferred within a smaller timespan, so every time we double available bandwidth we also halve the annoyance of working on remotely rendered graphical interfaces. – anx Jan 21 '21 at 06:10
  • SAN, Supercomputing (e.g. Infiniband), data center network bandwidth to name a few. – fuero Jan 21 '21 at 09:21
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    Now in 2021 there is 100 gigabit Ethernet. As before they are for moving lots of data very fast. – Michael Hampton Jan 21 '21 at 13:09
  • "order of magnitude higher than what your ISP provides" - That depends on your ISP. And even this is not for "Internet", there are lot of other ethernet connections. We are currently happily migrating vom 10g to 100g. – bjoster Jan 26 '21 at 13:06

4 Answers4

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It's quite useful for:

  1. backend of "Internet of the Things" (where all data is received)
  2. Distributed Storage system like CEPH/Gluster/Lustre
  3. Firewall/Router system (some Linuxes/BSDs are used for that purpose)
  4. Streaming Servers
hunter86_bg
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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.

Tim
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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.

berndbausch
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"The only substitute for bandwidth is more bandwidth."

Zac67
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