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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).'"
From the article: "iSCSI (Internet SCSI) over Ethernet is replacing: *SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface..."
iSCSI is far superior to stadard SCSI for obvious reasons, and its widespread adoption will really spark a massive gain in the SAN (Storage Area Network) market. The technology is there, now we just need more major vendors of SCSI devices (especially storage and image filing systems) to make more SCSI devices that support iSCSI natively and applications that take advantage of it. Combined with practical solutions from vendors of network storage software like Veritas we could see some major spending in IT. And more money being spent on IT is always a good thing.
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?
"Because it is now impossible to sell networking unless it is called Ethernet". Incorrect. You can easily sell network gear that is tagged with the "WiFi" designation.
Is there going to be storage that can read/write that fast by 2010 too?
paintball
Bandwidth is good, but what about latency? Ethernet has traditionally suffered from high latencies and doesn't work very well for High-Performance-Computing-Clusters. Myrinet and other ridiculously overpriced networking hardware works much better for clustering. I wish terabit ethernet does something about ethernet latency so that efficient clustering becomes a little cheaper.
What is that article actually supposed to be about? Seems like a scrambled mess of acronymic buzzwords with no actual content to me.
...is there going to be a bus on desktop machines that can read or write that fast?
Probably not. But I could definitely see it being useful for top-end server systems with hugely parallel storage and memory access.
The article is already slashdotted so I can't read it. So what is it refering to? 10Tb LAN speeds? If so - who cares? My existing 100Mb (200Mb switched full duplex) LAN is hardly the weakest link.
10 Terabit Ethernet: from 10 Gigabit Ethernet, to 100 Gigabit Ethernet, to 1 Terabit Ethernet
By: Steve Gilheany
(Aug 27, 2003)
Ethernet Timeline
* 10 Megabit Ethernet 1990*
* 100 Megabit Ethernet 1995
* 1 Gigabit Ethernet 1998
* 10 Gigabit Ethernet 2002
* 100 Gigabit Ethernet 2006**
* 1 Terabit Ethernet 2008**
* 10 Terabit Ethernet 2010**
* Invented 1976, 10BaseT 1990
** projected
Every kind of networking is coming together: LANs (Local Area Networks), SANs (Storage / System Area Networks), telephony, cable TV, inter-city optical fiber links, etc., but if you don't call it Ethernet you cannot sell it. Your networking must also include a reference to IP (Internet Protocol) to be marketable.
Above 10 Gigabit Ethernet lies 100 Gigabit Ethernet. The fastest commercial bit rate on a fiber transmitter/receiver pair is 80 Gigabits per second. Each Ethernet speed increase must be an order of magnitude (a factor of 10) to be worth the effort to incorporate a change, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet has not been commercially possible with a simple bit multiplexing solution, but NTT has solved this problem and has the first 100 Gigabit per second chip to begin a 10 Gigabit system [http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news02e/0212/021204.htm l]. Currently, Nortel Networks offers DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) where 160 of the 40 Gigabit transmitter/receiver pairs are used to transmit 160 wavelengths (infrared colors) on the same fiber yielding a composite, multi-channel, bandwidth of 6.4 terabits per second. 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 (such as DWDM) (and vice versa). In fact, Atrica has been advertising such a multiplexed version of 100 Gigabit Ethernet since 2001. [http://www.atrica.com/products/a_8000.html] Now that NTT has announced a reliable 100 Gigabit per second transmitter/receiver pair, the progression may be 1 wavelength for 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 10 wavelength (10 x 100 Gigabits per second) CWDM (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing) for 1 Terabit Ethernet, and 100 wavelength (100 x 100 Gigabits per second) DWDM for 10 Terabit per second Ethernet in the near future.
iSCSI (Internet SCSI) over Ethernet is replacing: *SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface, in 1979 it was Shugart Associates Systems Interface: *SASI), *FC (Fibre Channel), and even *ATA (IBM PC AT Attachment) aka (also known as) *IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) *see [http://www.pcguide.com], Ethernet is replacing ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), Sonet (Synchronous Optical NETwork), POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service, which is being replaced with Gigabit Ethernet to the home in Grant County, Washington, USA ) [see references from Cisco Systems 1, 2, 3, or 4] [www.wwp.com], *PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect local bus), Infiniband, and every other protocol, because, as described above, if you don't call it Ethernet you cannot sell it. Everything, in every type of, communications must now also include a reference to IP (Internet Protocol) for the same reason.
At the same time that the transmitter / receiver pairs are getting faster, and DWMD is adding channels, the capacity of fibers is increasing, as is the transmission distance available without repeaters. Omni-Guide [http://www.omni-guide.com/; then click on enter] is working on fibers that "could substantially reduce or even eliminate the need for amplifiers in optical networks. Secondly it will offer a bandwidth capacity that could potentially be several orders of magnitude greater than conventional single-mode optical fibers." Eliminating
Tethernet?
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Pretty cool for LANs, but otherwise rather useless.
We already have gigabit Ethernet - which (even rounding down somewhat to account for checksum and overhead and such) should be capable of transferring around 100 megabytes of data per second. How many of us have ever seen even 10% of this in practice for a general Internet connection? I'm lucky if I can pull one megabyte per second from an Internet site that doesn't happen to be, y'know, next door.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Imagine how much pr0n....er....um...I mean valuable business data you could get with this!
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Gigabit ethernet, and 10 gigabit ethernet both have it in their specs to accomodate 100 ethernet and 10 ethernet. Therefore 10 Tb ethernet will be called 10000000/1000000/100000/10000/1000/100/10Base T for the OTHER technologies included. The chip will be bigger unless its fancy FPGAing with the FPGA code downloaded from the driver.
So to sell it as Ethernet they have to make it compatible as such. Or to make things cheaper, they will have to settle on a different name to sell cheaper 10Tb cards only. Cheaper 10Tb cards will sell more than compatible ones.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
iSCSI bascially takes native SCSI commands, wraps it up (encapsulates it), and sends it over the wire. In other words, you could use a SCSI scanner over a network without having to resort to PC Anywhere or something.
Interestingly enough, if you did it wouldn't be a very big success because the internal PCI or PCI-X bus in the system would bottleneck the interconnects. The NICs would need on-board processors to scale with their enormous bandwidth potential so that they could solve problems like matching checksums and other package management tasks and not have to pound on the system bus so hard.
It wasn't long ago that we really started exploiting video chipsets for rendering graphics, either...
My prediction for the year 2010... I'll still be on a 56k modem. :-(
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
...to prevent the Slashdot Effect?
dinner: it's what's for beer
These high speed DWDM systems talked about in this article aren't designed to be used for LANs or home internet connections - they are meant for high speed backbones that span huge distances (such as across the US or Australia).
They carry mutiple 10Gb/s or 40Gb/s channels on one fibre pair - and these individual channels can be added or removed as necessary, and can be treated independantly. Saying this, 10Gb/s is still a lot, and generally that needs to be broken down into more managable sections, such as gigabit copper ethernet or maybe even 100Mb/s.
It may seem like overkill, but at the core of most networks, there is a distinct lack of bandwidth. Maybe the VOD and video calling predicted 10 years back won't happen on these networks, but more applications are requiring these huge amounts of bandwidth.
An example of this sort of system being rolled out is the Marconi Solstis system in Australia. A very small part of that system was designed by me :)
I am sure packetengines (http://www.scyld.com/network/yellowfin.html) is all over this.
These guys had gigabit routers four years ago when I was helping to set up the AFN (ashlandfiber.com)
Cool to see.. mo'faster is mo'betta
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
I am an EE major and when I was going to university in the late 80s early 90s everybody was going on how fiber was the future and that we'd run out of capacity on copper RealSoonNow: who'd have thought about 10TERABIT ethernet back then! (heck, I was happy as a clam when my lab upgraded from coax to baseT so the jokers couldn't bring down my box by unscrewing their terminators...)
-- the cake is a lie
Lucent was selling their all-optical DWDM switches (Lambda Series) last year. The LambdaXtreme is a 40 Gbps DWDM unit that uses micro-mirrors (MEMS) for switching. Data is not converted to electricity, but stays as photons the entire route. It is capable of sending data through optical fibers for 1,000 KM *without regeneration* and at 4,000 KM *without regeneration* at reduced (10 Gbps) speeds.
They sold a pair of units (and you have to buy at least 2 or they are useless) to Time-Warner. There is one on the East Coast and one on the West and it forms a major part of their cross-country backbone.
8-10 of the units were sold to Korea (South) for use in wiring up their national rail systems. I also believe NTT DoCoMo (Japan) bought a couple.
This is all last year. Since I'm no longer with that company (layoffs), I no longer get all the product updates. These units were in my product group for install, service and support.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
250 and 300GB SATA disks are already pushing sustained over 50 mbytes/sec, at 7200 rpm. That's enough to max out most gigabit cards, except for the higher end ones.
As long as the aerial density keep increasing, we will see slow but steady increases in speed too.
If anything, networking has been the stagnant factor lately. Gigabit over copper has been out for years now, and the hardware for it is still overpriced, and mostly made by a few manufacturers.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
When you're wiring up your home so that you can have high-quality, practically uncompressed high definition video coming from a central video server such that every room can be watching a different stream simultaneously, while some may be actively editing data and rerendering, you're going to want the fastest, fattest pipe you can get.
And who knows what bandwidth-hungry LAN application you're going to want to do in the future. Have you any idea how long it takes to render a cup of tea, Earl Grey, hot in spacetime over a 100 Mbit/sec connection? I can tell you one thing: it's not going to be hot.
More bandwidth than you'll ever need is always better than not enough. Especially when you aren't leasing it from an outside party!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
My apologies for both the recursive quoting and name dropping.
Use Python
I'll stop trolling here after I get this out: stop thinking this has anything to do with your top-of-the-line, supergeekin' Athlon.
:(
This technology is namely meant for backbones, be it on a campus level or as a longer haul backbone. Obviously, your desktop will not need to transfer anywhere near that much data within the next, say, 25 years. If you were using your head while you were reading the (albiet poorly written) article, I wouldn't have to troll.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
Can you imagine trying to stop mp3 transfers with this technology?
A 5MB mp3 would take 0.000004 seconds. A whole CD would take a whopping 0.00056 seconds.
One would think that if they have a device that could route such traffic, then it must have some sort of bus/hardware capable of handling it. Somwhere along the line this traffic has to hit a node-point, right?
Now really, I don't see much point in directing 10Tb ethernet to one machine anyhow. But it would be great for large node-points. I you think about 100Mbps, generally no single machine is going to use that much in a normal network. However, many machines will, and sometimes quite easily in large situations.
For huge networks, or ISP's, 10Tb would be the way to go.
And that assumes that transfer occurs at chip speed, which it doesn't. Assuming a modest clock multiplier of 8 between system bus and chip, that's a 15x overcapacity, even if the entire computer were used to transmit.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
10Tb/s means
5 million 2Mb/sec compressed video streams
Copy a 250GB drive in 1/4sec
23 thousand streams of 24bit x 1600*1200pix x 75hz uncompressed
1.5k byte packets at 670 million/sec
2 billion x 50 byte packets per sec
port scan all ports on all IPv4 addresses in 20 minutes
Every US resident downloads Metallical's new track in 30 minutes of my http server
And this will all be available at Fry's for a $50 NIC and $30 cable ? When ? I'll hold off buying any new network HW 'till then :^)
Seriously, there are some significant implications here. For 1, you won't need a monitor connected directly to the "fast video card" to get the next fancy 3D graphics features. Memory bandwidth and network bandwidth will be similar meaning that clustered NUMA systems will be interesting. Some of the design decisions we deal with today have been because getting the person close to the computer to improve the experience was a critical factor will disappear.
You can always pull new cable through the walls if you arent afraid of a little work. There are millions of tricks and tools and snakes and whatnot, electricians pull new wire all the time with minimal damage to the walls (minimal as in 5 secs with a putty knife to fix it).
Hell you should be able to tie the new cable to the old, and yank it through, removing the old as the new replaces it.
Unless you're going to be a dork and staple the Cat5 every few feet.
BTW, that 1000 foot roll wont go as far as you think it will.
The phrase "future proof" is kind of stupid. By the time your 4 cat5s per room are completely obsolete, your house will be in need of serious overhaul anyways, like new roofs, new floors, definately a paintjob.
So messing the joint up a tad with new cable wont be a big deal.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
As I understand it, low-voltage cables like Ethernet and telephone wires do not need conduits. What they do need, however, is to be plenum-grade if they go into a "forced air space" like an air conditioning duct. It's also probably a bad idea to bring them through a hole in the ceiling of your wiring closet like I did :) in my install. But I don't have a good replacement idea other than a bunch of holes drilled from the top of the wall and brought out through a box on the wall.
You can get boxless wall-plates (also for low-voltage use only) that have bendy clips that go around the sheetrock. In a single-story house that means drill down from the attic (and hope there aren't cross-studs in the wall) and fish the wire down to the hole you've cut.
The main thing you can do to "future-proof" your installation is to put in enough wire! It's worse to have to add wires later than to leave spare wires unused for a few years. You can get modular wall plates (at Home Depot, even!) that can take up to six modules, so put four to six Cat5e and an RG-6 everywhere you can. Just cable-tie multiple cables together before you start so you only have one big cable to deal with.
And keep in mind that this can be your telephone wiring too. Just put an RJ-11 jack in the plate instead of an RJ-12, and cram a regular RJ-11 down the jack in your wiring patch panel.
Since you're doing a fresh install, you could get big-ass clips to hold the wire bundle against the stud. Make them vertical to reduce interference with your horizontal power wiring. And make sure that your wiring closet can be in an air-conditioned area.
And forget about fiber, since while there is esentially only one kind of copper for networking these days (unshielded twisted pair), there are at least two kinds of fiber (single-mode and multi-mode), and having the wrong one is just as useless as having no fiber at all. And fiber doesn't like tight bend angles either.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
From the article they have a snippet at the top that goes like this - i've added the years in between on my own:
10 Megabit Ethernet 1990*
(5 years)
* 100 Megabit Ethernet 1995
(3 years)
* 1 Gigabit Ethernet 1998
(4 years)
* 10 Gigabit Ethernet 2002
(4 years)
* 100 Gigabit Ethernet 2006**
(2 years)
* 1 Terabit Ethernet 2008**
(2 years)
* 10 Terabit Ethernet 2010**
I think this would be more accurate though:
* 100 Gigabit Ethernet 2006**
(3 years)
* 1 Terabit Ethernet 2009**
(3 years)
* 10 Terabit Ethernet 2012**
Basically I don't see the technology being developed any faster than 3-4 years because as it stands, home main stream still opperates at DSL connections of 10mb and home networks run at 100mbs. As far as the business world goes, the majority of companies I have had the opportunity of working at run only 100mb networks with IT "thinking/testing" going 1gb.
In short - there is NO demand for 10gb networks currently and especially NO demand for 100gb let alone a freakin terrabyte pipe. Although those things are "nice" and very "cool", there is not a big enough demand/NEED for this kind of transfer - YET.
You could also use the analogy of the current PC market. There is not a big demand for new systems right now because even for business use a P4 1.6ghz with 512mb of mem runs everything work and game related fine. As soon as something comes out that REQUIRES/needs more power THEN you will see a rise in pc sales.
Ave Molech Setting
It's even simpler than this, in a way. "Ethernet" denotes a protocol. But in Ethernet parlance, "DWDM" is a Physical Medium Dependent (PMD) sublayer. 10 Gb/s Ethernet (802.3ae) already includes a WDM PMD, 10GBASE-LX4.
The article mentions DWDM systems with 100 Gb/s per wavelength. That's bogus.
I am an optical engineer at a 40 Gb/s startup. The jump from 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s is huge. Many signal degradations (chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion, nonlinearity,
Compensating for chromatic dispersion, PMD, et. al. requires optical components which DO NOT follow Moore's law. These components are handmade specialty devices.
While a business case can be made for 40 Gb/s, the jump to 100 Gb/s is commercially pointless. If you are building a DWDM system anyway, just spread the same data across more 10 Gb/s channels.
What the hell is "Directions", anyway? It sounds like sci-fi fluff meant to entice VC's.