Ethernet The Occasional Outsider

coondoggie writes to mention an article at NetworkWorld about the outsider status of Ethernet in some high-speed data centers. From the article: "The latency of store-and-forward Ethernet technology is imperceptible for most LAN users -- in the low 100-millisec range. But in data centers, where CPUs may be sharing data in memory across different connected machines, the smallest hiccups can fail a process or botch data results. 'When you get into application-layer clustering, milliseconds of latency can have an impact on performance,' Garrison says. This forced many data center network designers to look beyond Ethernet for connectivity options."

Comments

sharing memory over ethernet?

[jm91509]

That just sounds daft. Given the bottle neck harddrives are for cpu's, it doesn't sound like a great shock that when you gotta wait for your data over ethernet you're going to see problems.

Maybe I should RTFA...