We’re accustomed to getting great deals in the IT world. Technology and competition conspire to drive down costs even as performance rises. We treat this dynamic as gospel truth. That is, until it’s no longer true. Processor clock rates rose steadily for nearly 40 years. Most people thought this would continue forever (it was a “law”, right?), until we ran into a physical limit that pushed the industry to multi-core devices instead. We saw it with Ethernet, too, as performance climbed from 10Mb to 1000Mb while pricing steadily declined.

Some IT managers now have the expectation that this trend will continue with 10Gb Ethernet, and will soon yield another 10X improvement in price performance.   To those folks I say, “don’t hold your breath.”  We’ve come to the end of the line on free upgrades. (more…)