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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.
Be good for education and research though. JANET is planning to be 10Gbps on the core by late-Summer so they'll be pleased the standard has been approved (see http://www.ja.net/superjanet/index.html)
My building recently had new copper installed. Previously had Cat5 (great for 100BaseT) but was upgraded to cable meeting the specs for the latest Cat6 draft spec (rather than just Cat5e).
Is 1000BaseTX the end of the line for copper? Or will there eventually by a 10000BaseT that will run on Cat6?
Can someone bring me up to speed?
1) The link shows it has been approved by "Revcom" - who are Revcom, and why should I be interested in their approval?
2) Seeing as ethernet seems to speed up by an order of magnitude each time, why does the standard not allow for many more x10 jumps?
3) How far is 10Gb Ethernet from getting to the consumer/business market?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I'm guessing 10GbitE will be used for inter-switch and inter-router connections long before it gets to the desktop. Ever looked at performance comparisions between 100BT and 1000BT between just two PCs? A couple years ago the difference wasn't much... NICs weren't efficent enough and the host PC's didn't have enough CPU power to handle that many tiny packets per second. Jumboframes and faster CPUs have helped a lot since then, but we're still a long ways away from even 90% utilization between two PCs with 1000BT. And here we are with 10GigE, with 10x as many packets per second.
I'm I the only one that thinks the only efficent 10GigE NICs are going to be PCI-X cards with an onboard 2.6 GHz P4 co-processor and 512 MB of buffer?
Actually, burying pipe is the most expensive part..... I worked briefly for a university computing service a few years ago and they spent an absolute fortune to buy a network of yellow plastic pipe connecting all their buildings. A relatively trivial incidental expenditure was to pull some cable through it. When that sort of cable is obsolete, a further trivial expenditure will replace it, etc....
10Gb Eithernet is pushing the limits of hardware. Everyone working on this are only running the optical link at 10Gb, but then splitting the signal into 4 lanes (called XAUI) so the signal can be processed at sane speeds. Both the 10Gb Ethernet spec. and the 10Gb Fibre Channel spec. take this into account, so all the data is 128-bit alligned.
Companies won't have hardware in their labs until early next year, so don't expect that you will see and 10Gb NICs at Best Buy any time soon.
The reason is material properties.
Six months ago, I had the chance to talk with the 3Com technical manager who was on the board drafting the spec.
What he said was very simple; all tests indicated that the only way to have 10Gb over copper is to limit the connection distance to centimeters!
1Gb already pushed the envelope for copper, using all pairs, multiplexing, and error correction; 10Gb is just not possible.
You thought the latency was bad with RDRAM!
The speed of light will be a hindrance to your plan.
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E_NOSIG
I work in a data center for a major ISP/backbone provider. While we've got OC48's coming in from the backbone, it's 1Gb ethernet to the LAN distribution routers. With 10Gb ethernet, we can finally fully utilize that incoming bandwidth without having to use a lot of ports.
Another good use is the emerging use of iSCSI, or SCSI over ethernet. 1Gbps ~ 100MBps, but more likely around 60-80Mbps. With 10Gbps, a SAN based on iSCSI will actually be able to use the throughput of those SCSI drive arrays.
Eventually this will trickle down to the desktop, but not right now. So it doesn't really matter what PCI can handle - this isn't presently meant for it. BTW, 133MHz PCI-X will give 10Gbps, so if you have a dedicated PCI-X bus to that adapter, you can handle it will today's technology.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Does anyone know how big packets one can send thru such a pipe ?
100MBit maintained the same MTU as 10MBit, 1GBit maintained the same MTU too - leading to severe problems with performance. It's bad enough on 100Mbit, it's horrible on 1Gbit, to think that they maintained the 1500 byte limit on 10Gbit gives me the shakes...
Yes, I know about "jumbo frames", and I challenge you to find an affordable 1Gbit switch that actually supports it.
Anything below 64KByte packets would be insane as I see it.
Anyone knows ?
I recall in university that we were told that a phone line was limited by physics to 1200 baud. They had a couple horrendously expensive Hayes 1200 baud modems in the lab to play with.
My 1.5 Mb/s DSL line runs over those identical copper lines.
Yes, physics limits what we can do over copper, but perhaps our understanding of those limits isn't quite as finely tuned as it will be in a few years.
That said, I have no problem with fibre for new installations, but even that will be upgraded over the years. This is cutting edge. It will become commonplace before too long.