IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 802.3an, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and 1 GBase-T are highlighted in a discussion of the work of KeyEye Communications and SolarFlare Communications on conditioning of copper wire to send 10-Gigabit/second Ethernet frames over short distances in a data center. They are collaborating as part of a task force and as competitors in the field. Hiroshi Takatori of KeyEye and George Zimmerman of SolarFlare will try to show that the market for copper-interface 10-Gigabit Ethernet chips is viable. Bringing multiple Gbits per second to the desktop will be less critical to use of Ethernet as a high-speed serial connection for linking of servers, storage clusters, and switches in the data center. Various fiber options compete with 802.3an, but 10-Gigabit is regarded as a pure data center play, where short links would provide Ethernet framing among Web server clusters. Therefore, the first generation of products would not need a star-based switched packet topology. Ethernet in that environment would be used as a serial alternative to Infiniband or Myrinet. Among topics covered are cabling issues, the potential market of 10BGBase-T, and KeyEye's effort to reduce the footprint for line cards that use IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)-standard 10GBase-T chips with direct copper interfaces and to also embed copper interface chips in an optical package adopted as a multi-source agreement to reach IEEE compliance through the MSA cage.