Slashdot Mirror
IEEE Releases 802.3ba Standard
An anonymous reader writes "EEE announced the ratification of IEEE 802.3ba, a new standard governing 40Gbps and 100Gbps Ethernet operations. An amendment to the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard, IEEE 802.3ba, the first standard ever to simultaneously specify two new Ethernet speeds, paves the way for the next generation of high-rate server connectivity and core switching. The new standard will act as the catalyst needed for unlocking innovation across the greater Ethernet ecosystem. IEEE 802.3ba is expected to trigger further expansion of the 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet family of technologies by driving new development efforts, as well as providing new aggregation speeds that will enable 10Gbps Ethernet network deployments."
It's interesting how this will increase the adoption of iSCSI storage, yet the original reason to go to iSCSI will be lost since fiber cables will have to be laid.
Either way 1Gbit Ethernet is beginning to feel a bit like a bottleneck with storage and other bottlenecks being removed.
It'll take some time between ratification and cheap D-Link switches...
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
You know networking exists outside of the internet, right?
I just finally upgraded all of the connections in my house to Gigabit Ethernet, you fucking clod you!
Living With a Nerd
Yes, but the porn was low-res and slow to download. So it's a double-edged sword.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
100Gb isn't for server to server or server to storage connections today, it's for network aggregation (switch to switch ISL's). 40Gb is there for server to storage on some high end configurations.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I would rather have the adds and my 15Mb line, then my old 1200 baud connection to compuserve.
We only use 300 baud for internal stuff.
In 10 minutes I can down load some porn, whack off, and be a sleep in 10 minutes. In those days it was hours just to get a 5 second clip.
what..TMI?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Unfortunately there is no corresponding 100000Base-MrT
The MTU is still 1500 bytes though :(
For end users, 100gb/s is almost 'enough'. It's just a hair short (about 2.5x) of the speed needed to stream uncompressed video at the highest resolution anyone is likely to seriously consider, at 240hz. Once you hit that point, you just remote your applications to wherever the data is, and forget about moving data ever again, assuming, of course, that the data is close enough to you to avoid any latency issues for interactivity.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
But are we talking about 100Gb/s over copper or fiber?
-Rick
Fibre and short-haul (~10m) copper, at least for the current standard. Historically, there's usually a lag of several years between a new Ethernet standard and a 100m copper version.
I'm a bit sceptical about folks who say they'll never be a copper version, because I've heard that tale often enough before. I confidently predict it will be the Year of Linux on the desktop before it's the year of Fibre to the Desktop.
USB3, HDMI, DVI, Ethernet, DisplayPort, FireWire, eSATA, proprietary. There should be one kind cable that can be used for all of these purposes. We have the technology. Consumers will thank you.
The standard includes specifications for copper. 40GBASE-CR4 for 40GB which specifies 4 lanes of twinax cable, and 100GBASE-CR10 for 100GB which specifies 10 lanes of twinax.
Surprise, surprise. Serial too slow? Try parallel!
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Yes, but the porn was low-res and slow to download. So it's a double-edged sword.
Still, I think you're underrating the merits of the slow reveal... I mean, as the image file was loaded byte by byte onto the computer's memory, filling the display with that lustworthy graphical data, gradually revealing more and more, until you had a naked woman on your screen in 320x200 glory, 1bpp plus 4 bit colors, foreground and background, per 8x8 character cell... The five minute wait for the elusive delights to be laid plain was like a striptease...
And when I say 5-minute wait, that's how long it took to load an image from disk. Modem would take longer. :)
Bow-ties are cool.
There isn't a whole lot of difference between the raw speed of the signal in a copper line and fiber line, the electrical signal already travels at effectively the speed of light (or close enough that it doesn't really matter). It's distance that's a problem for copper. An electrical signal through copper has significantly more attenuation than an optical signal through fiber, which means right from the very start the signal is cleaner and more usable. The cleaner the signal, the easier it is to pick up small variations in the signal accurately, and the more data you can pack into the signal. Copper is also vulnerable to noise, which further reduces the signal quality, which means a less complex signal is possible. This is why copper is useful for ultra-high speed IO inside a computer covering inches or less (the IO in a CPU travels only nanometers and is obscenely fast), but once you start stretching it a few feet its effectiveness drops off dramatically. Fiber is capable of handling much longer distances before the same attenuation loss occurs.
Other than that it's just the equipment on the back end that are different, and the concepts behind both fiber and copper are the same. Only the components are different.
In other words, it's trivial to make copper just as fast or faster than fiber. In fact, the fastest copper connections are already faster than the fastest fiber connections. What isn't trivial is making copper as fast as fiber over the same distances. Fiber wins hands down on a run of any distance. Therefor copper only wins on short runs, due to the huge price difference between the two.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller