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

Long Live!

[Anonymous Coward]

Long Live the Token Ring!

One Ring to rule them all

My idea: a vat of salt water & CAT5

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

When you get to many hops

[with_him]

I just blame it on the ether-bunny.