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10-Gigabit Ethernet Standard Approved

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the faster-pr0n dept.

A little birdie brings news that that 802.3ae standard for 10 Gigabit/second Ethernet has been approved. Everyone out there with Gigabit Ethernet - you are now officially obsolete. The new standard is fiber only, no more of that nasty copper stuff.

7 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. What an informative link. by taliver · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's one that might be a little more informative. I leave the google link to someone else.

    --

    I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!

  2. Re:not obsolete by larien · · Score: 4, Informative
    One word: striping. If you put enough disks in, you can get more than 1gbps out of a disk array. Realistically, though, you're limited to using this in two places:
    1. Large server with many, many disk controllers and even more disks
    2. Network backbones
    It'll creep in to the second quickly enough (once Cisco et al support it in hardware), I'd imagine (we already have a 4gbps backbone using 4 gigabit lines in our site) and the former will start happening at the top-end installations of E15K's and the like.
  3. In meaningful terms by Throatwarbler+Mangro · · Score: 5, Informative
    10Gigabit/sec = 1.25Gigabytes/sec

    1 LoC (Library of Congress) = 10 Terabytes = 10,000 Gigabytes

    That's 0.000125LoC/sec, or roughly 2.22 hours to transfer the entire contents across 10GigE.

    Wow.

    1. Re:In meaningful terms by Dark+Nexus · · Score: 4, Informative

      As a slight correction, when it comes to baud ratings, 10 Gigabit/sec = 1 Gigabyte/sec

      It's 8:1 for storage, but generally 10:1 for network ratings (an example - more for serial ports, but it still applies), thanks to a header and a footer bit sent with every byte. Sometimes (rarely), throw in a parity bit for good measure.

      Mind you, that's still only 2.78 hours.

      --
      Dark Nexus
      "Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
    2. Re:In meaningful terms by psychos · · Score: 5, Informative

      This is incorrect. Low speed serial interfaces do tend to use a start bit and a stop bit, but higher speed interfaces generally do not.

      I'm not very familiar with 10gige technology yet, but my brief research shows that it uses 64B/66B coding (e.g., 2 overhead bits out of every 66). Running at a clock rate of 10.3125GHz, that gives you a full 10Gbps of throughput, or 1.25 GB/sec.

      100baseT uses 5B/4B coding, which does result in 2 overhead bits out of every 10 just like your serial line example. However, 100baseT actually runs at 125MHz so you do get a real 12.5 MB/sec out of it.

      Of course, if you really want to be picky about "LoC/sec" or whatever pointless measure the popular media has latched onto this week, you need to consider the overhead of TCP headers, whether or not you want to allow jumbo frames in your calculations, and so on.

  4. Re:Hit me with the clue-stick please! by GigsVT · · Score: 5, Informative

    revcom

    IEEE

    Consider yourself hit with clue-stick.

    --
    I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
  5. Re:not obsolete by questionlp · · Score: 5, Informative

    The highest speed PCI-X (64-bit @ 133Mhz) is capable of reaching ~1GByte/sec which is just about the speed of 10 Gig Ethernet. There was/is the promise of Araphoe (sp?) that resembles AMD's HyperTransport but would be used for expansion cards rather than a chip-to-chip pathway.

    The other bottleneck with even high-end Intel-based servers could easily choke when dealing with not only 10 Gig Ethernet but also add Fiber Channel, multiple channels of Ultra 160 or Ultra 320 SCSI RAID, etc., since the memory bandwidth (and processor bus speed?) would then become the possibly the next bottleneck. RISC servers don't have that much of a problem just yet, but sooner or later it will be.