The Ethernet switches that were originally designed for network traffic are not appropriate for dealing with the more strenuous requirements of data centers. That's the fundamental proposition behind a new generation of 10GB Ethernet switches that Woven Systems has launched.

Admittedly, few data centers are anywhere near maximizing out the bandwidth of their Ethernet switches. But after waves of server consolidation and the rise of virtualization, they day when the Ethernet switches in the data center become sorely taxed is not all that far off. This is because virtualization essentially allows IT organizations to put in five or more virtual servers, for example, for every physical server. Eventually, each of those virtual servers starts generating more traffic on the network that will ultimately require IT organizations to upgrade their switch.

Woven is claiming that it has developed a new approach to Ethernet switch architecture that allows it to deliver four times the performance of a comparable Cisco switch as roughly one quarter of the cost. That essentially means that they clam they can guarantee that traffic traveling over its switches will be operating a wire speed to provide the lowest latency possible.

With the rise of virtualization, multicore processors, cloud computing and service oriented architecture, a premium is soon going to be placed on network performance. That requirement, Woven contends, means that data centers will require Ethernet switches that were specifically designed to meet those needs, as opposed to Ethernet switches that were designed to handle basic networking tasks.

It's way too early to say whether a relative newcomer such as Woven could overthrow Cisco in the data center. But the arguments being put forth by Woven have a degree of relative merit that at the very least should get a hearing as IT organization start to think about what the next generation of data centers might look like.