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The Road to 100 Gigabit Ethernet
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.'"
Even PCI-X? I'm sure, these will improve too, in the future, of course...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Having a 100Gb home network will begin a Second Odyssey of user frustration: the broadband connection out of the wall will still only be 10Mb.
How about we get 1gigabit to become standard first... i have yet to connect anywhere (home, office, school) with a gigabit connection...
Those terms imply consumer acceptance. Even the fastest consumer hard drives can't saturate a 1 gigabit ethernet connection. Consumers don't even need 10 gigabit, why would they want 100 gigabit?
Besides, while 1 gigabit ethernet has gained consumer acceptance over the years, with more and more consumer-level products supporting it, the vast majority of consumer networks are still 100 megabit. Most new computers might have onboard gigabit ethernet, but since manufacturers keep putting 100 megabit switches in convergence products (routers with onboard switches), nobody can use gigabit.
Of course, I realize that the article uses these terms in relation to large companies, but I don't think they can be used in that context. Even so, the current equipment to handle 10 gigabit connections is quite expensive even for large corporations, the cost of 100 gigabit would be prohibitive.
So why are we even talking about it now? This isn't going to change anybody's life (unless you've trying to get on the standards committee) today, tomorrow, or likely this year. How about this be reopened when some working silicon (or whatever material it's going to take to operate at this speed) is up and working in the lab? Then it might have some relevance.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
(Obviously you have to have enough bus & memory bandwidth and compute power to drive a 100 Gb/s link - but this is a necessary piece of the puzzle).
You might be right in that a single consumer drive can not make use of that storage, but there are systems out there that can saturate a 10gbs link many times over.
Just because you can not fathom a use for the technology, does not make it pointless. Just try managing an environment with 50+ backup servers (because of the 1gbs and 100mbit links to those servers) compared to an environment that has 5 backup servers connected via redundant 10gbs links to the core switches in a datacenter.
Not only do we get *more* done with 1/10 the number of servers, we have reduced the management and administrative workload and made administrators time available to work on important things like disaster recovery.
As long as storage and disks keep growing, we _have_ to keep increasing the speeds of the links between them. If we don't, the amount of time it takes to access and back up those disks will increase exponentially along with thier capacity.
Ethernet is a local network protocol, and doesn't have much to do with the way you communicate across the internet. This will help anyone running more than one machine in a particular location.
Businesses will benefit, and users with more than one machine at home will benefit.
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