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Terabit Ethernet Is Dead, For Now
Nerval's Lobster writes "Sorry, everybody: terabit Ethernet looks like it will have to wait a while longer. The IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections Higher Speed Ethernet Consensus group met this week in Geneva, Switzerland, with attendees concluding—almost to a man—that 400 Gbits/s should be the next step in the evolution of Ethernet. A straw poll at its conclusion found that 61 of the 62 attendees that voted supported 400 Gbits/s as the basis for the near term 'call for interest,' or CFI. The bandwidth call to arms was sounded by a July report by the IEEE, which concluded that, if current trends continue, networks will need to support capacity requirements of 1 terabit per second in 2015 and 10 terabits per second by 2020. In 2015 there will be nearly 15 billion fixed and mobile-networked devices and machine-to-machine connections."
No, unbounded latency. It'll happen, just not yet.
We need terabit Ethernet NOW, not in a decade.
You know my 5 year old nephew keeps confusing need and want too.
How much are you prepared to pay for this desire? If it will cost say 4 times greater per bit to implement Terabit with current technology do you still want it?
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Powers of 10.
Over copper or fibre.
At copper distances of 100m.
Call it a standard, if you like. Each time you have to upgrade, look to the next power of ten at that specification.
Because although 40Gb/s exists, it's not popular and you won't find it in your average computer supplier, ever. Sure, it's expensive to jump like that, but every technology boost is expensive and I'd rather we skipped the proprietary-data-center-only junk and leave them to their own devices and specify real-world, millions-of-businesses standards at jumps big enough to a) make a difference, b) be expensive at first but mass-market after (rather than sharing the market with half-assed solutions), c) run on the same specs at the previous generation (if not the same cables exactly, at least I can replace 100m runs with 100m runs and not worry).
I realised I wasn't being clear about why they can't define the standard now and wait for the technology to catch up.
A standard like this is always a trade off based on the currently available technology, How fast are your analogue transistors, how much processing power do you have to do forward error correction. How fast are your ADCs/DACs to do signal shaping? This determines things like which coding schemes can you use. Also what market needs this and what costs are acceptable, for example DWDM and all the associated costs is perfectly acceptable if fibre is comparatively expensive, however even though in the 90s that would have been the only way to do 10G now we have the capability to do it electrically; designing the spec too soon and guessing is a really bad idea. We don't know how 20nm and lower process nodes are going to behave well enough to predict what their characteristics will be when this technology reaches maturity, to get that wrong is to end up with a standard that either under performs or is over expensive.
Put it another way, the processor architecture you would choose to achieve 80MFLOPS in 1976 is very different from the architecture you would choose in 2006. Telecomms has exactly the same concerns.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
And what exactly is he doing over ethernet that needs that much speed? I'm only just now looking at upgrading our small business network to gigabit. A couple of years ago the cost of a 48 port gigabit switch was pretty high, but now it's very reasonable
which is totally what she said
We need terabit Ethernet NOW, not in a decade.
You know my 5 year old nephew keeps confusing need and want too. How much are you prepared to pay for this desire? If it will cost say 4 times greater per bit to implement Terabit with current technology do you still want it?
I agree with you completely. Learning to seperate our 'wants' from our 'needs' can make all the difference in our 'consumer-driven' lives.
I may 'want' that shiny new car, but I don't 'need' it. If I have a vehicle that meets my needs, I've learned to be grateful for having that. Coveting that 'new shiny' (new car, other person's money/spouse, phone or internet connection speed, whatever it is) can often lead a person down the road to ruin.
In my experience, I know to be happy and grateful for what I have, and don't waste energy on what I don't have (yet). Of about half the people who win a lottery, 5 years later, they end up wishing they'd never heard about the lottery in the first place. Because it irrevocably changed their lives for the worse, and they realize too late that they were happier before they 'won'. Just my two cents.
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I am so smert! I am so smert..., I mean smart! - Homer Simpson
You may discover that you can't have what you want. There are real physical limitations we have to deal with. One issue, with regards to copper Ethernet, that we are having is keeping something that remains compatible with older style wiring. Sticking with 8P8C and UTP is becoming a real issue for higher speeds. At some point we may have to have a break where new standards require a different kind of jack and connector.
Also in terms of "data center only" devices that isn't how things work. You care what data centers use because you connect to them. There can be big advantages in terms of cost, simplicity, and latency, to stick all on one spec. So 40gbps or 400gbps could well be useful. No, maybe you don't see that to your desktop, but that doesn't mean it doesn't get used in the switching infrastructure in your company.
Also each order of magnitude you go up with Ethernet makes the next matter less. It's going to be awhile before there's any real need for 10gbps to the desktop. 1gbps is just plenty fast enough for most things. You can use things over a 1gbps link like they were on your local system and not see much of a performance penalty (latency is a bigger issue than speed in most things at that point). I mean consider that the original SATA spec is only 1.5gbps.
As for 100gbps, it'll take some major increases in what we do before there is a need for that to the desktop, if ever. 10gbps is just an amazing amount of bandwidth to a single computer. It is enough to do multiple uncompressed 1080p60 video streams, almost enough to do a 4k uncompressed video stream.
Big bandwidth is more of a data center/ISP need than a desktop need. 1gbps to the desktop is fine and will continue to be fine for quite some time. However to deliver that, you are going to need more than 1gbps above your connection.
As a parent of a young one I also hear this 500×/day. But what's the cost of "Terabit now and you're safe for a decade" versus "400Gb now, then rewire & replace all your gear in 3-5 years for 750Gb (if there isn't a standards war you have to gamble on), and then do that all over again in another 3-5 years for 1.1Gb"? Because that's the kind of creep we've seen since the early days of token ring and then 10BaseT. Manufacturers certainly want the step-by-step option but the admins and engineers? Not so much so.
Hardly any 10 base T systems bother with the CDMA/CD system that original ethernet had , in fact its more like a serial protocol rather than a broadcast "in the ether" one now. WHy not just give it a new name?
Your nephew is probably about as mature as most geeks.
We ads on TV for 200gbit internet here in Sweden, yet - most people dont have anything above 4mbit. Sweden is pretty much a long forest country, and only the few big cities we have can enjoy really fast internet.
I live in a small city here, 10K+ something citizens, and Im the "lucky" one to live nearby the city core itself, so I get around 12-14mbit on a good day, this is far more than my peers get, they are lucky to hit 2mbit, and live only 2-3km away from the city core.
But you know what? I do just fine on 12mbit. With that, I can even watch television in FULL HD without any jumping or skipping, even directly from the USA via proxies.
You know these port speeds are not meant to be used on access switches right?, at least on the beginning, there is no need to. Only high performing computing and Virtualization servers use more than Gigabit links today, but TenGigabit bundles and higher bandwidth links are used on almost every large network on core connections and core to distribution.
The name came from the original idea of it being a wireless protocol so has never made sense in any device ever sold with that name.
Verizon, Comcast and others will still prioritize traffic so that P2P will never be faster than 1Mbit/sec. because they just won't have the capacity to handle it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I manage several petabytes of storage on a large compute cluster, and we could use Terabit ethernet yesterday. Network fabric throughput is our limiting factor on pushing data out.
One senses that vendors went for the 400 Gb standard on the premise of "why sell one network upgrade when you can sell two at twice the price", and not from actually catering to customer's needs.
It's similar to the current 40 Gb/100 Gb standards. No one that I know actually wants 40 Gb. I can bond 4 x 10 Gb and get that already. But vendors want that double upgrade fee from those companies that have to have every ephemeral competitive advantage.
"Only high performing computing and Virtualization servers use more than Gigabit links today, but TenGigabit bundles and higher bandwidth links are used on almost every large network on core connections and core to distribution."
I know quite a few non-science professional fields that saturate gigabit to each desktop, and would go for Infiniband, or 10Gig-E if it was viable outside of big corps. Editing/compositing of HD or greater resolution movies shuffle HUUUUGE amounts of data around, and you need a decent turnaround time for the data....
Shouldn't we pushing photons over glass by now. Fibre infrastructure has existed for decades now, isn't it time it was scaled down to individual computers and appliances?
If you want 1Gb to 10Gb to your desktops you will want 10 times that in the core of your network where that file storage lives.
And then there are individuals like me, with ambition, whose wants are achieved through ambition, and that shiny new car will be mine when I want it, because I have the capabilities to achieve my goals...
So you buy your shiny new car, and then another shiny new car because you want that one too, and then a McMansion because bigger is better, and you need all that extra space to store all your shiny possessions. At the end of the day are you satisfied with your shiny possessions? No, you need more shiny possessions, and your life is centered around a vapid cycle of consumerism while you sacrifice your ethics and free time to attain them.
The name came from the original idea of it being a wireless protocol so has never made sense in any device ever sold with that name.
WiFi is ethernet, with wireless extensions. MACs, frames, etc etc etc. Before everyone knew what 802.11 was, it was even referred to regularly as wireless ethernet.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'll just point out that most 10Gb switches (datacenter switching) have totally dropped 10mb and 100mb support. Or, in the case where it is supported, you get some fun knock-on effects like buffering of all switch traffic (using the CPU / memory for switching activity) on the switch instead of using the hardware fabric for direct switching. This has repercussions for latency and switch performance.
I found this out the hard way by trying to plug a (cheap?) Cisco ASA (with 100Mb ports) into Arista and Cisco Nexus 5XXX switches... I ended up having to use a crappy 1Gb netgear switch to bridge the two devices (which was OK, I just used the switch connecting ILO to the ASA for that).
For cost reasons, there is absolutely no reason to only wire up for 10Mb anymore. It is no cheaper than using the silicon for 100Mb link speed even if your device is much slower than 100Mb. Hell, to that end Raspberry PI has a 1Gb Ethernet port on it.
- Toast