10 Terabit Ethernet By 2010

Eric Frost writes "From Directions Magazine: 'Because it is now impossible to sell networking unless it is called Ethernet (regardless of the actual protocols used), it is likely that 1 Terabit Ethernet and even 10 Terabit Ethernet (using 100 wavelengths used by 100 gigabit per second transmitter / receiver pairs) may soon be announced. Only a protocol name change is needed. And the name change is merely the acknowledgment that Ethernet protocols can tunnel through other protocols (and vice versa).'"

Comments

And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet?

[raehl]

Is there going to be storage that can read/write that fast by 2010 too?

Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet?

[mirko]

I guess there will only be one computer, at this time : a virtual computer distributed over millions of physical nodes, so the storage will might be each of these nodes' memory... Like Freenet but also aimed at distributing workload.

Re:Good stuff

[prrole]

iSCSI is NOT far superior to SCSI, or fibrechannel. iSCSI has massive issues related to deterministic latency, and computational cost of processing TCP/IP at gigabit speeds. You may see some growth in the of iSCSI in the workgroup segment, but I don't see iSCSI replacing fc/scsi in the near future for mission critical computing.

Re:Good stuff

[4of12]

iSCSI

A really nice development.

Yet more big advantages to iSCSI are the ability to keep the

• large,
• noisy,
• power-hungry,
• heat-generating,
• unsecure

disks out of workstations in workers' offices and down the hall in a

• sound-proof,
• secure,
• air-conditioned,
• UPS'd server room with
• mirrored images,
• archival backups

.

Next thing you know, GPUs will come with on-board Ethernet controllers and USB plugs for keyboard and mouse, and be built in to the back of an LCD monitor.

Re:Good stuff

[Austerity Empowers]

I don't keep up much with the progress of the Ethernet technologies at hand, so is it realistic to suppose that the practical implementation/creation of 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 1 Terabit Ethernet, and 10 Terabit Ethernet will be seperated by merely two years each?

I think not. 10 GbE hasn't exactly taken the world by storm and it's been around for over a year now. I know of products that have 10 GbE ports, but I have not witnessed an abundance of demand. To be nice the author of this article is just a little facetious in his claims.

In reality if you read the article it's hard to even take him seriously. To say that Nortel's DWDM system is ethernet is like calling your 56k modem ethernet. Yeah, so you can pass ethernet frames on it. It's not standard, it's not documented anywhere in IEEE 802.anything (esp with regards to conformance), so it's NOT ethernet. Just passing ethernet frames does not make you an ethernet device. I'm honestly not really sure what the author's point is except that he seems to think 1) ethernet is increasingly popular, 2) everyone should want to carry ethernet frames, and 3) people want bigger and bigger pipes. The first 2 are true, the third is less true now than it was 3 years ago.

So the answer is, it wouldn't surprise me if we see 10 Terabit links by 2010, I doubt very, very much that we'll see a 10 Terabit ethernet port on a single chassis ethernet switch with 100 Terabits of switching capacity. I could be wrong, I hope I am, but it doesn't seem reasonable.