[reacharavindh]

As a person with a sysadmin + HPc background having built several clusters recently, this is not true(anymore). 10G NICs are almost as common as Gigabit NICs(both in availability and cost). To give you an idea, we commonly use 10G NICs on all compute nodes, and they connect to a 10G top of the rack switch which connects to services like file servers via 100G connections. The 10G connections are all 10GBase-T simple Ethernet connections. The 100G connections are DACs that are more expensive but not prohibitively so.

What cloud providers give you for VMs is not the norm in the datacenters anymore.

[kosolam]

Everything is relative. If you are a cloud provider it’s one thing. I’m speaking from the perspective of the small medium business that rents these physical or virtual servers.