SFP+ Optic VS 10GBASE-T

I can to a point see people who run cat-7 cable in the house since it is a pain to rip the walls down. But how likely is it that they move to a different house before 10g actually gets into the consumer market. Are you really going to spend many thousands of dollars today just in case you might need it.

This futureproof stuff is like the motherboards they try to sell so you can upgrade your processor in the future. Few if any one did that since other technical changes made it not cost effective.

10g port are almost always used to interconnect switches. At short distance you get better performance using fewer larger switches with a larger backplane than trying to cable together small ones. This is why you tend to see almost all optical ports on 10g equipment. You generally hooking together more distance data centers or maybe buildings. You do see more copper being used but generally single mode fiber is what is used to "futureproof" this cable too. 10g is now slow for very large companies you can get 40g and 100g interfaces and they only run on fiber.

The need for 10g in the corporate environment is still limited to fairly large companies. Pretty much they are only used to connect networking gear. There are a limited number of "server" things that have 10g ports but what is really inside these boxes is a bunch of servers running on 1g connection being combined with a switch.

So even in the corporate environment machines are being limited by the maximum rates diskdrives can transfer or memory speeds etc etc. Single machines can barely use 1g unless designed for the purpose.

In a home use I can't see any reason at all buy any form of 10g equipment. unless you have some business in your house with a a hundred servers or so.

The big joke on being futureproof is by the time 10g equipment gets common for home use 40g and 100g will be in more common use in the corporate market so you will never catch up. Your best bet it to buy only for what you can project in the next 3-5yrs and i doubt they will have solved the bottlenecks inside the PC platforms so you can really use 10g.

If you want fairly inexpensive managed switches the HP procurve line works well. Most are not server switches the are use to aggregate 1g links back to a core via 10g ports. Mostly this is to connect IDF on building floors back to the main data center.

Its mostly going to be a price thing key being the cost of the SFP that go in your server. You might find that copper SFP cost more than short range optical. On a switch the copper are cheaper if the are integrated rather than SFP based. Most sfp cost between $300-$500 depending on the platform.

It will be the server SFP costs that dictate your choice. You would think the copper ones would be cheaper but they tend to be more expensive in many platforms. A switch that runs with fixed 10gbase-t ports tends to be a little cheaper than the same switch with SFP ports and SFP modules.