I am under the impression that you should use optical for 10GbE networking because of a BER (bit error rate) several orders of magnitude lower than copper.
I'm pretty sure I previously found documentation stating so, but for the life of me I just cannot find it.
I'd like to see documentation on typical BER (in general, if such a thing exists) for:
- 10GBase-T ports (with Cat6a cabling)
- 10GBase-CX4 ports
- 10GBase-T SFP+ modules (Cat6a cabling)
- Fiber SFP+ SR modules
- DAC SFP+ modules
Twinax is rated at 10^-17 at <= 10M
Fiber is generally 10^-18 or better (lot of variables here, though - especially on long haul)
Ethernet's minimum specification is 10^-12. This is where the contention comes in as far as FC goes - it may be that a TP infrastructure can support better than 10^-12 (and hopefully most do) but at 10G speeds even that much error translates to a bad packet every few minutes.