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10Gb Ethernet Alliance is Formed
Lucas123 writes "Nine storage and networking vendors have created a consortium to promote the use of 10GbE. The group views it as the future of a combined LAN/SAN infrastructure. They highlight the spec's ability to pool and virtualize server I/O, storage and network resources and to manage them together to reduce complexity. By combining block and file storage on one network, they say, you can cut costs by 50% and simplify IT administration. 'Compared to 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel, a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet-based storage infrastructure can cut storage network costs by 30% to 75% and increases bandwidth by 2.5 times.'"
i'm worried they had to say 4 * 2.5 = 10 on /.
From their white paper,
"The draft standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet is significantly different in some respects from earlier Ethernet standards, primarily
in that it will only function over optical fiber, and only operate in full-duplex mode"
There are vendors, such as Tyco Electronic's AMP NetConnect line, that have 10G over copper. Has this been discarded in the standard revision?
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
Networking is getting faster in leaps and bound, yet hard drives are still uber slow.
I bet in 8 years 1GB/sec will be normal. I'm already downloading at 2.5MB/sec from my ISP roadrunner.
Can't wait to wire my house with 10Gbit ethernet while my cable modem is lucky to get 10Mbit during off-peak hours.
The 10GEA is not the same as the storage alliance mentioned in TFA.
By combining block and file storage on one network, they say, you can cut costs by 50% and simplify IT administration.
What is "block" storage?
etc.
I can do this already. Up to 90 odd Gbit.
Ethernet will have to be cheap.
Deleted
So how will tcpip networking over this speed measure up to dedicated storage devices like SAN over fibre channel? I have to suspect not; existing iSCSI over 1GB tcpip is a lot less than 1/4 of 4GB fibre to a decent SAN. Sigh, I'm afraid even more of my databases will get hooked up to cheap iSCSI over this instead of SANs space that costs more dollars per capacity but delivers the speed when needed :( Reports coming up fast enough? Remember the planning phase when the iSCSI sales rep promised better performance per $ than SAN? It wasn't better overall performance, just better per $. There's a BIG difference.
If these new fast ethernet specs came with specs for plugging multiple parallel paths between machines all under the same host IP#s, so we just add extra HW ports and cables between them to multiply our bandwidth, ethernet would take over from most other interconnect protocols.
Is there even a way to do this now with 1Gb-e, or even 100Mbps-e? So all I have to do is add daughtercards to an ethernet card, or multiple cards to a host bus, and let the kernel do the rest, with minimal extra latency?
--
make install -not war
Hope they fix the pricing issue, because I the FC network I just put in cost less per Gb than a 1 gig-E network. When compared to the cost per Gb of a 10G-E netowrk, the entire thing cost less than the optics on the 10G stuff, let alone the actual switch costs.
;-)
I'm also noticing that most if not all of my systems never even tap the bandwidth available on a pair of 4Gb FC ports, let alone 10Gb. I'm sure there are folks out there who need it, but it aint us.
Of course, our corporate standard is Cisco, so I'm sure that had something to do with the high cost of the ethernet equipment
I thought that war was over already.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
At least they got it right !
... this time anyway.
...the 20Gb per sec ethernet alliance, it has all the benefits of the 10Gb alliance, and more.
Surely there'll be no way, that anyone can possibly think of, that'll somehow be better than that.
Sigh, Aggregating 2 or more 1 GIG adapters does not give you 2 GIG of throughput. It is a sliding scale; the more you add the less total bandwidth you see. The safest bonding scheme uses LACP; Link Aggregation Control Protocol. This protocol communicates member state and load balancing request to the link member. 10G over copper will be a good thing for VM's. Sad; that the current crop of 10G over copper adapters do not approach 5 gig throughput; raw. Give the industry time; this it just like the introduction of 1 GIG from fast Ethernet. It took 2 generations of ASICs to get to what we consider a GIG card today.
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
in other news, ISO starts the process of ratifying the new MS10G(tm) specifications.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Between the network cable and the drive cable. USB subsumed many old-technology interconnects, perhaps 10 Gb Ethernet can replace SATA and continue the trend of decreasing the number of interfaces required on a computer.
hehehe, that makes marginally more sense with an "l" crammed in there ;)
Yes, it works to the extent reasonable/feasible.
No, it isn't a robust scalable solution. To play nice with various standards and keep a given communication stream coherent, it has transmit hashes that pick the port to use based on packet criteria. If it tries to use criteria that would actually make the most level use of all member links, it would violate the aforementioned continuity criteria. I have seen all kinds of interesting behavior depending on the hashing algorithm employed. I have seen a place buy 500 servers from one vendor and have a 2 port aggregation to somewhere. The problem being, that vendor had all even mac addresses on the first ethernet port, and so one of the ports got to be virtually unused because it was a hash of the mac addresses mod the number of member ports. Since there were two ports, it was mod two and all evens went on one port, and only odds would have been the other.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I can't think of anyone who's longing to get a fatter gas pipe connected to their house, or a fatter pipe to municipal water, or a cable of higher capacity to bring in more electricity.
But we're not like that with bandwidth. We always seem to want a fatter pipe of bandwidth! Will it forever be like that? Is the household bandwidth consumption ever going to plateau, like electric, gas and water consumption has in the US? (I know that global demand for these utilities is growing, but that's mainly because there are more people and a larger proportion are being hooked up to municipal utilities. The per-household numbers are not really changing very much, and in some cases decreasing.)
Will there be a plateau in bandwidth demand? If so, when and at what level? Thoughts?
yes but this isnt for homes, this is for offices, no (normal person's) home has a 100MB internet. I think the limit for broadband will simply be when you can download a film in 5 minutes over BT, which basically depends on how fast the average is not just your connection.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I work a lot with 1G fibre channel; it is worlds faster than 1G ethernet for storage applications, just 'cause fibre channel was designed, first and formost, to handle storage. Sure, you can run IP over it, but that's not what it's *for* - the problem is compounded by the fact that ethernet has a bunch of legacy baggage. so obviously, given equal speed, fibre is going to beat ethernet when it comes to storage.
The big advantage of using bog-standard ethernet is scale. If everyone uses this connectivity method, it's gonna get cheap. Potentially you could have ethernet that is a lot faster than fibre channel for the same price, making up for the overhead. The Idea is sound, I think. Reality has yet to catch up, though.
Good,managed name-brand 1G fibre-channel switches are almost free, and good (name brand, managed) 1G ethernet switches still cost real money. (the used market is what I'm familiar with for both)
If us in the US had to pay per mb, I'm sure it would plateau pretty darn quick.
Yea, I got that, but the fact that this is feasible for offices now means that homes could use the same technology in the near future. There are some "normal" homes in Sweden that already get 100MB internet, which is enough for streaming HD, but not enough for many other things we will eventually come up with. So I was wondering whether there will ever be an "enough" level to the home. For a business like Google, "enough" might only be: the sum of all user bandwidths in the world. But for users, will there be a plateau?
My parents installed a fatter pipe to the water system a few years ago. Before, if anyone flushed the toilet, the shower would be a scalding hot drip for the next 5 minutes. Now, they can run the shower, and the washing machine, and the dishwasher, and flush every toilet in the house with nary a dent in the flow.
Just thought you should know that there ARE people who clammer for fatter pipes to other things.
My friend uses a doubly fat water hose to pump natural source water without losing pressure so quickly.
He also needs to get a fatter municipal water pipe because he's adding a carriage house.
Who'd have thought?
I've always felt that there's a per-person
bandwidth limit that's inherent in being human,
and our ability to pay attention to more than
one thing at once.
I think that about 1Gbit *per-person* in your
household is about right. A HDTV channel or two,
some background audio. A telephone
conversation. Some online gaming, and a few
software/media downloads going in parallel is
a reasonable model for someone with lots of
"stuff" on the go.
Obviously, if you run significant *services* out
of your house, these numbers go up. So for an
average house with 2.5 adults and 1.5 children,
something like 3-4GB/sec should do just fine.
There has not yet been a plateau in how fast and how distant we want to communicate with each other, so there probably won't be a plateau in bandwidth demand. Communication started with speech in person (which wasn't very fast or could reach many people), and then moved to paper and ponies (as in the pony express, which could at least reach a larger audience), visual with signal towers (starting to speed up), telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, satellites, the internet...the pipe keeps expanding. It may never stop, because what we want to say to each other will keep getting more and more complex.
Sure, our communication speed might plateau for a time: for a long time TV was limited to NTSC and PAL sizes, but unlike people's appetite for water (which is pretty much fixed, as there is only so much you can drink or shower in it), people's appetite to communicate is unbounded.
http://xenaoe.org/
I'm way ahead of ya guys!
A lot of details left to fill in but I have a few clusters up and running already. Working on documenting my setup so that others may duplicate it.
Yes, it will plateau, eventually.
The per-capita demand of each of those other utilities grew at a large rate when they were first introduced. The first running water was for maybe a sink and a tub, then we started adding toilets, multiple bathrooms, then clothes washers, dishwashers, automatic sprinkler systems, etc. As technology progressed, the amount of water delivered to a given house each day increased dramatically, but the change happened over many decades, which allowed the infrastructure to be updated as new buildings were constructed. I've been in old buildings where flushing a toilet in one room causes the water to slow to a trickle in another room.
The same happened with electricity: we went from a couple light bulbs to central heating to electric appliances to televisions to computers to all the various mobile gizmos and gadgets we plug in now. Lots of older houses have electrical wiring that is not up to the task of running all the lights, the dryer, three computers and the television all at once. Again, this infrastructure was updated gradually as new structures were built or old ones were renovated.
We're seeing the same demand increase with the internet, as we go from BBS/Usenet to text www to images to games to video and beyond. The difference now is that this increase is happening at a rate that is orders of magnitude greater than the other utilities, so structures are having to be upgraded more than once as technology progresses.
The other difference is that faster data bandwidth requires technological breakthroughs like more efficient packet switching software, faster hardware, etc. More electricity just requires more breakers and bigger wires. It scales linearly.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
who want to download more pr0n.
That's mainly because the utility companies demand is increasing slower.
Specifically, electricity - just compare the number of plug sockets in a house built today compared to a house built in your grandparents day, the number of ring mains, and the size of the breaker board.
The demand for electricity in the home has soared since it was first implemented. It has plateau'd now somewhat in the west, but that's due to the cost of making it going up steeply, and more wareness of energy efficiency.
Most people were pretty happy with basic broadband compared to dialup. Now streaming HD video is becoming commonplace, faster broadband is needed. I think 50Mb - 100Mb will be a decent plateau spot for a while. At least until the next bandwidth hungry app comes along.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
You never think "there isn't enough gas to heat my house."
Water is different: if you don't have enough water coming out of the shower, its because someone started the dishwasher or flushed the toilet. Its a local problem.
When bandwidth gets to the point where you don't think about it, you'll stop wanting more. For people who browse the web & read email, current broadband is probably enough and they don't give it a second thought. For those that want to do everything they can do at the office over VPN, its not even close.
While some pieces of equipment will allow configuration of the transmit hash, many will not.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.