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

100ms ethernet latency?

[victim]

I don't think I need to read anymore, well, I did verify that the number really appears in the article.
This author does not understand the subject material.

(I suppose you could deliberatly overload a switch enough to get this number, maybe, but that would be silly, and your switch would need 1.25Mbytes of packet cache.)

Re:100ms ethernet latency?

[merreborn]

Looks like the author fucked up the definition of millisecond too:

"By comparison, latency in standard Ethernet gear is measured in milliseconds, or one-millionth of a second, rather than nanoseconds, which are one-billionth of a second"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3Amill isecond&btnG=Google+Search
"One thousandth of a second"

Seriously. How the fuck does this idiot get published?

Not an Auspicious Start

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article, three paragraphs in:
"(By comparison, latency in standard Ethernet gear is measured in milliseconds, or one-millionth of a second, rather than nanoseconds, which are one-billionth of a second)"

That would be one-thousandth, not millionth (aka micro second). Not a good start...