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

[Brahmastra]

Bandwidth doesn't necessarily help play games with very little delay. For quick responses in games, you need low one-way latency. A network may be capable of throwing out 1000 zillion bytes/second, but if it takes too long to send out the first packet, the game isn't going to work very well. One-way latency is way more important than bandwidth when the goal is to send out many small packets as soon as possible. High bandwidth would greatly speed up large downloads, but for faster response in games, etc, lower latency is what you need.

What about latency?

[Brahmastra]

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.

Re:iSCSI???!?? Firewire?

[mao che minh]

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.

Who needs this? Answer...

[chill]

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.

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.

Durability of Ethernet

[Sir Rhosys]

Just read this in ESR's Art of Unix Programming and thought it was applicable:

"Robert Metcalf [the inventor of Ethernet] says that if something comes along to replace Ethernet, it will be called "Ethernet", so therefore Ethernet will never die. Unix has already undergone several such transformations."

-- Ken Thompson

Here is the page in the manuscript with the quote.

My apologies for both the recursive quoting and name dropping.

Attn Geeks: This is not for your desktop

[MrPerfekt]

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. :(

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.

Just to get this into perspectivc

[ozzee]

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.