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Ethernet The Occasional Outsider

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the popular-kid-gets-snubbed dept.

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."

9 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Long Live! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Long Live the Token Ring!

    One Ring to rule them all

    1. Re:Long Live! by MrSquirrel · · Score: 3, Funny

      I saw students bring in computers with token-ring cards when I worked at a University Helpdesk. They would come in and say "My computers broken, I plugged 'the internet' in but it won't connect" (we would troubleshoot over the phone and they would want us to come up to their room, after much repeating our policies they would cave and bring it down because they wanted to download their pr0n). I was baffled when it would turn out to be a token-ring card... I was like "Where the HELL did they get this?". I'm convinced it's part of the worldwide conspiracy to drive me insane.

      --
      A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
  2. My idea: a vat of salt water & CAT5 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    In our Data Center, we have a great big vat of steaming salt water and we drop one end of the cat5 cables from each server into the vat....those packets that can't figure out where they're going just drop to the bottom and die ...we have to drain this packet-goo out once a month. (but we do recycle it...we press it into CDs and sell them on Ebay)

    (Seriously, haven't people heard cut-through switches which just look at the first part of the header and switch based on that... store-and-forward switches are so "1990s")

    TDz.

  3. When you get to many hops by with_him · · Score: 5, Funny

    I just blame it on the ether-bunny.

  4. Milliseconds? by rubmytummy · · Score: 2, Funny
    On my planet, a millisecond is a full thousandth of a second, not just one millionth.

    Oh, well. People tell me I'm just slow.

  5. Re:Software design by Amouth · · Score: 2, Funny

    what it looks like to me is.. ok so they set something up using normal 100/1000 ethernet and then realized something was slow and that if they use gbic 30gb ports things run faster... can someone please sent them a cookie?

    --
    '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
  6. Metric System Still Not Clear To Some by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Maybe the author meant "imperial milliseconds"?

  7. Re:Channel Bonding by kjs3 · · Score: 4, Funny

    So you have an environment with requirements totally unlike the ones described in the article and needing none of the solutions illustrated in the article. Hey...thanks for letting us know. Maybe the other million Slashdot users with environments irrelevant to the post can let us know what they have as well.

  8. Tolkien ring by Shabazz+Rabbinowitz · · Score: 4, Funny

    I had recently considered using this Tolkien ring until I found out that deinstallation is very difficult. Something about having to take it to a smelter.