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The Road to 100 Gigabit Ethernet

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the one-less-traveled-by dept.

darthcamaro writes "InternetNews is reporting that a grassroots effort is being formed to push 100 Gigabit Ethernet into the mainstream. That's 10x faster than the current fastest Ethernet standard 10 GbE and 1000 times faster than "FastEthernet" but it's not going to be here anytime soon. From the article: '"A group of companies have formed to approach the IEEE to get a vote within the IEEE body to start a standard and that's really where we are," Garrison told internetnews.com. [...] The process then to becoming a full standard is a long and drawn out one that could take five or more years. Garrison explained that the first part of the standard will look at technical and economic feasibility, as well as LAN and WAN opportunities.'"

10 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How about 1 gigabit first? by drasfr · · Score: 2, Informative

    Gigabit switches are pretty cheap these days. I rewired my home network, 7 machines with a gigabit switched network. I paid about $80 for a 8 ports gigabit.

    My windows machines are loving accessing my file server on the network now! Though now it is getting time to buy a 16 ports switch and to upgrade the wireless network too. My 11b connection is getting too slow to work on the laptops...

    I probably would have no need for a 100gigabit network at home... not yet... but I know some a company that were maxing out their gigabit link to internet. They just did an upgrade to 10 gigabit (2 links for redundancy of course)... and with the growth they are experiencing... 100gigabit wouldn't be out of the question for them in a few years...

  2. optical switching by evangellydonut · · Score: 2, Informative

    have you even looked at the signal integrity issues related to any hss link running at 10gbps/link? unless you run 10 lvds hss for half-duplex 100gbps it'll have to be optical. then it becomes an issue of designing an optical switch that can handle the load, and a ridiculously (and impossibly so by today's standard) fast optical-to-electrical interface, again, to at least 10 hss lvds pairs to achieve those speeds... dream on!

  3. Wider? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I realise your comment has been moderated "insightful" but could you explain it for us slow people.
    What does 100G ethernet have to do with internal bus width?
    Thank you.

    1. Re:Wider? by mlheur · · Score: 2, Informative

      If your PCI bus can only serve data to your NIC at 50Gbps, your card that can send at 100Gbps won't have anything to send that fast because he's waiting for the computer to feed him.

      Now of course that goes away if you only use 100Gbps as trunks between switches, and connections to individual PCs stays at GigE, but the internal bus of the switch still comes into play.

    2. Re:Wider? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
      Ok, I get it now.
      Actually I work for a router company. So I look at 100G as an interconnect between routers not as a termination point.

      BTW 40Gbe is the most likely next interface. But some ISPs have an all ethernet network (no sonet) so 100G is the next logical step to them.
      Sonet based shops have always been more reasonable; 4x (oc12->oc48->oc192) speed each generation not 10x (10->100->1Gbe-10Gbe).

      OC192 and 10Gbe are the same rate so there is lower cost because of shared components (optics/framers).
      OC768 (40G) will be the next step in sonet unless there is a major push to 100G.

      Thanks for the replys.

  4. Re:How far can they push this? by zackeller · · Score: 2, Informative

    They gave up on UTP cabling for the 10gbe standard. 100gbe will be fibre.

  5. Re:Is not that wider, than today's internal buses? by TTK+Ciar · · Score: 2, Informative

    I would use this to connect 10Ge switches together, not to connect directly to individual servers in the network. Three 32-port 100Ge switches, linked to 32 32-port 10Ge switches by three links (ie, so each 10Ge switch had three links to different 100Ge switches and one link to each of 29 hosts) would allow any two hosts in a 928-node cluster to communicate at full 10Ge capacity (or, more likely, communicate with any number of hosts in that cluster at 10Ge aggregate capacity).

    Something like this: 928 node network

    -- TTK

  6. Re:How far can they push this? by lgw · · Score: 2, Informative

    We could also figure out how to do DWDM or other technologies that are easy with radio to put data on the wire in a more effecient manner. Going to fiber works, of course, but then you still have the problem with switches and GBICs and the like: the signal has to be in copper at some point, and 100Gb pushes the limits on that until we start using better encoding.

    --
    Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  7. Re:Is not that wider, than today's internal buses? by TTK+Ciar · · Score: 2, Informative

    I used xfig.

    -- TTK

  8. Re:confused by Bananatree3 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Most likely 100Gbit will run on Fiber Cables, which have MUCH more bandwidth than their copper-based equivelents (Cat6,etc.)Wikipedia says that they have the potential to carry terabits of data per second.

    For the ethernet cables, according to wikipedia, Cat6 is reliable up to 1Gbit connections. However, Category 7 cables have been developed for 10Gbit connections. It seems to me that it might be possible to push ethernet cables up to 100Gbit. But that is a BIG if, as I don't know how much further the standard RJ-45 cables can be pushed beyond Cat7.