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We've all seen the PowerPoint slide that depicts the relative pricing of 10GbE, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel. Usually, the upshot is a plug for the presenter's wares.
Central to the argument is the calculation of price per gigabit/second -- the sum of per-port costs of host adapters and switches, divided by the Gbit/s delivered by the technology. Marketing math? Maybe, but the results can prove interesting.
It's an intriguing exercise overall, and after viewing a few of these slides, we at Byte and Switch decided to undertake our own comparative worksheet of per-port pricing. The result is in the table below:
Table 1: Storage Connections Compared
| Server adapter or HBA price per port | Switch price per port | Price per Gbit/s (sum of adapter port and switch port costs, divided by Gbit/s) | |
| 10-Gbit/s InfiniBand | $586 | $300 | $89 |
| 10-Gbit/s Ethernet (CX4) | $738 | $1,380 | $212 |
| 10-Gbit/s Ethernet (fiber) | $1,600 | $1,420 | $302 |
| Gigabit Ethernet (copper or fiber) | $112 | $110 | $222 |
| 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel | $900 | $110 | $252 |
| 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel | $736 | $483 | $309 |
| Source: Byte and Switch | |||
By way of comparison, here are two price-per-gigabit worksheets from vendors with axes to grind (names have been withheld):
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