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10-Gigabit Ethernet Standard Approved
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.
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.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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...
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.
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.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Now my PC133 RAM is *really* obsolete. It can't even handle an ethernet connection!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.)