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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.

16 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Approved != Affordable by CodeMonky · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Approved or not it will still be some time before costs come down enough so that comapnies can justify replacing their gig backbone with 10gig.

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    --"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
  2. not obsolete by Mortin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    considering hdds can hardly transfer at 1gbps, gigabit is hardly obsolete... yet :)

    1. Re:not obsolete by GeckoUK · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are correct, but only in the case were you have a network of two computers.

      In the real world a company deploying this is likely to have hundreds if not thousands of machines all connected at once.

    2. Re:not obsolete by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      not too many people would hook up a single box to a 10GB pipe (although many of us would like to). who knows - it might happen eventually!

    3. Re:not obsolete by GigsVT · · Score: 4, Insightful

      We're going to need something to replace PCI before we can use 10Gbit ethernet fully though. Even 64bit 66Mhz PCI has a max (in theory) of 528 Megabytes/sec.

      On a side note, I have sucessfully pulled 130Mbytes/sec out of 5400 RPM IDE Disks on 3ware controllers, with a cost less than $9000. 3 controllers, 24 disks, 64 bit 33Mhz PCI. RAID 0 over 5. So the potential is there to exceed current GigE, without too many disks or controllers, or getting too expensive.

      It would also help a lot if we could get regular gigabit ethernet working well first. I think there was a story here on Slashdot not long ago that showed that most GigE cards had trouble pushing over 400Mbits even with large frames. Only the expensive $500 one came close to it's full potential (900Mbits). My experience is that without jumbo frames, there is hardly any advantage with lower end GigE cards.

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    4. Re:not obsolete by monkeydo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Please put down the CCNA study guide and back away slowly. Ever since the invention of switches most people haven't had to worry about collisions. We're talking about full duplex, 2 hosts on a collision domain. In other words no collisions. If you are getting collisions on GigE or switched FastE you are doing something very wrong.

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  3. With this annoucement by SkyLeach · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It should be obvious that to burry copper is completely obsolete. Per yard, fiber should be cheaper to manufacture and bury.

    10Gb speeds should be enough for anybody, so start building the infrastructure now and leave the telcos in the dust.

    Will they do it? No. Why not? Because they think that they should bury the copper/fiber hybrid cable that they have been burying and come back and do it again later.

    Burying cable is the most expensive part of telecomm.... retards.

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    1. Re:With this annoucement by runcible · · Score: 1, Insightful
      10Gb speeds should be enough for anybody No.

      I will have enough bandwidth when I get transfer rates comprable to the those on my motherboard.

      Once it no longer matters where the physical components of my computer are. Once my processor is rented cycles in Korea, my RAM is in orbit, and my storage media is distributed in 10K chunks all over the former Soviet Union, and there is no noticable performance hit. Then I'll have enough bandwidth.

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      remember the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi: If enough peasants die horribly, someone will probably notice
  4. Copper vs. Fiber by jandrese · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IIRC the original Gig-E hardware (if not the original spec) was Fiber only as well. Eventually people started coming out with copper hardware to save on costs. In most cases, the only real advantages to fiber are the long cable runs and the immunity to interference in noisy EM environments (like your typical computer room). The downside is the cost.

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  5. How big and busy is your network though? by Chas · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Seriously. Unless you're pushing quad-digit node-counts or are sharing streaming video all over the place (or just have lots of 0-day servers), 10Gb isn't going to really provide you with any appreciable performance gain over 100Mb.

    In most cases, small files are sucked down well before your bandwidth usage ramps up that far. And even larger files would probably only be sucked down a few seconds faster (mainly because of the speed of the storage medium on your system).

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  6. Re: Enough for anybody by cnladd · · Score: 2, Insightful

    10Gb speeds should be enough for anybody

    Just like 640KB of RAM should be enough for anybody? :)

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  7. Switch prices by stevelinton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Switches for these speeds are still kind of large, awkward and pricy. We had a visiting lecturer from one of the major players in this level of kit talking here about 6 months ago, and their top-end product (he showed a photo) was a 48-way full bandwidth 10Gb switch, It filled two full height 19" racks, consumed 20kW and cost upwards of $2M.

    Of course they've probably come down a but in the last few months...

  8. Fiber only - for the moment by Ashurbanipal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Every time they come out with a new standard for ethernet it's the same old schpiel - "you need this special expensive coax/shielded-pair/fiber-optic etherhose to make it work; you canna change the laws o' physics Cap'n!"

    Then eight months later somebody figures out how to run it on old lamp cords and string.

    Don't rush out to buy fiber unless you need the noise isolation (glass is great for that!) and don't care about the cost.

  9. Arg. by be-fan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now my PC133 RAM is *really* obsolete. It can't even handle an ethernet connection!

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  10. Obsolete? by mindstrm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I know you say this jokingly.. or do you?

    This is not THE new standard, it is A new standard.

    It is THE standard for 10Gbps ethernet. Nothing more.

    Gigabit is hardly obsolete when a) very few corporate networks are using Gigabit outside the server room, and...

    Your average workstation can probably not even push 10Gbps, or anywhere near it in the first place. (Of course, that's not as big a deal, because it's ethernet, right? A single host can't max it out anyway.. the higher capacity means more hosts with lower latency.)

  11. EH? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    > We discovered that you now need a new protocol to the adaptor card, and the overhead of that protocol is equal to a well tuned tcp/ip stack...

    You must have had really, really, bad design types to end up with a CPU-to-Adaptor interface that was anywhere near, even remotely, as heavy as TCP.