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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."

6 of 169 comments (clear)

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

    Long Live the Token Ring!

    One Ring to rule them all

  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. 100ms ethernet latency? by victim · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

    1. Re:100ms ethernet latency? by merreborn · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

  4. Not an Auspicious Start by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    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...

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

    I just blame it on the ether-bunny.