What do the large OEMs want? Answer- profits, Would OEMs rather sell optical or copper?

All x86 servers ship with at least one CPU from either Intel or AMD, at least a few gigabytes of memory, and in almost all cases, at least one disk drive.  It is hard to differentiate one OEM’s Intel or AMD CPU or memory or disk drive; consequently, the I/O (input and output) peripherals and architecture is where the money is.  Over the past ten years, Fibre Channel became a very profitable part of the server OEM portfolio.  OEMs do not want to lose the opportunity to upsell I/O hardware and software solutions by quickly commoditizing the I/O by putting 10GbE as the standard (free) I/O solution.Optical (the markup on transceivers is huge).  Final end user price is another huge factor that will drive 10GBASE-T adoption.   Typically, server, switch, and storage OEMs purchase SFP+ optical transceivers in volume for $50–60 today.  However, that is not close to the price that end users pay.  Because the OEM ties the use of their branded transceivers with their products via either maintenance contracts or firmware that checks the vendor data burned into the transceiver, the user typically must buy transceivers from the server, switch, or storage vendor.  This allows the OEM to mark up the cost of the transceiver astronomically.  Prices on the web range from $120 or so for unbranded SR modules, which the OEM typically will not support, to $500 and sometimes $1,200 or more for OEM-branded SR modules.  For the end user, the beauty of 10GBASE-T is that no one can mark up the PHY, because it is the standard I/O connection preinstalled on the server (as 1GbE is today) rather than an add-in component that the OEM can charge for. The result is a huge disparity in port pricing for optical versus copper ports.    








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