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IEEE Seeks Consensus on Ethernet Transfer Speed Standard
New submitter h2okies writes "CNET's News.com reports that the IEEE will start today to form the new standards for Ethernet and data transfer. 'The standard, to be produced by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, will likely reach data-transfer speeds between 400 gigabits per second and 1 terabit per second. For comparison, that latter speed would be enough to copy 20 full-length Blu-ray movies in a second.' The IEEE also reports on how the speed needs of the internet continue to double every year. Of what consequence will this new standard be if the last mile is still stuck on beep & creep?"
Ethernet transfers never use more than a fraction of available bandwidth. So it's 2 blu-ray discs per second, 4 tops!
I think someone got their bits and bytes mixed up...
How important is 400G to the last mile? You might as well ask how important a new high bypass turbine engine for jumbo jets will be to my motorcycle. It's for a totally different market. We're just barely getting to the point where it starts to make sense for early adopters to get 10G Ethernet on their ridiculously tricked out boxes (and industry has been using it for backhaul for some time now), and 1G Ethernet is still gross overkill for the majority of users. We have at least gotten to the point where 10MB Ethernet is too slow however.
I read the internet for the articles.
It's pretty easy to max out a 100Mbit ethernet link. Gigabit is also doable with a bit of work. It's a bit harder to max out a 10G port but it can be done with multiple queues and large packets. Once you hit 10G you really need to be using multiple queues spread across multiple CPUs and offloading as much as possible to hardware.
Consequences to me in long haul fiber optic transport? Massive.
Depending on how they implement 400G and Terabit it may affect the transport systems I deploy today, given that those speeds will likely require gridless DWDM which is currently just on the roadmap for most vendors.
Then, once it does come out, if our infrastructure is ready for it we will probably be able to deploy a Terabit link for the same price as 3 or 4 100G links. By that time 100G will start feeling a little tight anyway if we keep up the 50% a year growth rate.
There are no consequences to the last mile, for the same reason 100G has no consequences in the last mile.
Even 10G I only see used in the last mile to large customers like wireless backhaul or healthcare.
It's a silly summary but still an important topic.
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Agreed, the summary is really quite stupid. It does matter to the last mile since the last mile isn't currently the limiting factor in most downloads, but rather backhaul bandwidth is. Also it really matters for trans-continental lines, where upgrading the routers without having to upgrade the fiber can mean massive improvements without huge costs.
Last time around there was a question about 40GE or 100GE. Largely (although not exactly) server guys pushed a 40GE standard for a number of reasons (cost, time to market, cabling issues, and bus-throughput of the machines), and the network guys pushed to stay with 100GE. Some 40GE (pre-standard?) made it out the door first, but it's basically not a big enough jump (just LAG 4x10GE cheaper) so there is no real point. 100GE is starting to gain traction as doing a 10x10GE LAG causes reliability and management issues.
This diversion probably delayed 100GE getting to market by 12-24 months, and the vast majority of folks, even server folks, now think 40GE was a mistake.
Why is the IEEE even asking this question again? The results are going to be basically the same, for basically the same reasons. 1Tbe should be the next jump, and they should get working on it pronto.
Why is the IEEE even asking this question again? The results are going to be basically the same, for basically the same reasons. 1Tbe should be the next jump, and they should get working on it pronto.
Because the companies that make the hardware are going to sell more modules :-P
I can't understand why the author is even mentioning laptops and PCs on this article. First make sure you can utilize the existing 1gbps technology, then see how to implement faster interfaces. Right now the bottleneck at home ethernet is slow hard drives and cheap "gigabit" NICs that underperform.
Nah. My NAS (low end) maxes out my 1Gbps connection easily, and they claim I can team two 1Gbps connections together and it will fill them up. Based on the CPU usage and I/O, I'd say that it could do much more than that if it had better connectivity options. It's not unreasonable to need 10Gbps connections, although yes, to actually use all the bandwidth between any two connections would be more difficult. Most enterprise SANs and some NASs use RAM and SSDs as caching mechanisms and can easily saturate a 10Gbps link itself.
10Gbps = 1250MBps. My OCZ Revo could saturate that, easily.
The most common reason for giving a server that much network capacity is virtualisation. A server hosting a collection of VMs will have hardware that substantial, and all those VMs sharing one physical interface will put the 10G to good use.
The confusion between 40G ethernet and 100G ethernet is vast. But the actual reason for the standard has nothing to do with time-to-market or technological limitations beyond 40G. The 40G ethernet standard is designed to run ethernet over telco OC768 links. This standard allows vendors to support OC768 with the same hardware they use in a 100Gbps ethernet port.