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IEEE Sets New Ethernet Standard That Brings 5X the Speed Without Cable Ripping (networkworld.com)
Reader coondoggie writes: As expected the IEEE has ratified a new Ethernet specification -- IEEE P802.3bz -- that defines 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T, boosting the current top speed of traditional Ethernet five-times without requiring the tearing out of current cabling. The Ethernet Alliance wrote that the IEEE 802.3bz Standard for Ethernet Amendment sets Media Access Control Parameters, Physical Layers and Management Parameters for 2.5G and 5Gbps Operation lets access layer bandwidth evolve incrementally beyond 1Gbps, it will help address emerging needs in a variety of settings and applications, including enterprise, wireless networks. Indeed, the wireless component may be the most significant implication of the standard as 2.5G and 5G Ethernet will allow connectivity to 802.11ac Wave 2 Access Points, considered by many to be the real driving force behind bringing up the speed of traditional NBase-T products.
until its done.
...does it just require new plugs and jacks?
This will certainly save a lot of money for enterprises. I expect it will be the RARE company that will actually need 5Gbps per workstation. Most can probably get by on 100Mbps.
Wasn't 10Gbps a thing already?
Bob Metcalf, 1976
Why not just 5 apps per page like we had back on ios 5?
Instead of this 1 app per page crap we've been stuck with since ios 6 on the iphone and ipod touch.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Wasn't clear from TFA if this would work on Cat 5e, or if Cat 6 is required.
If wireless is actually outpacing twisted pair, why not pump the wireless signal down a dedicated coax for the long-haul routes instead? Will 802.11ac not work over existing coax runs?
Only LUDDITES want to use LUDDITE versions of AppOS! Modern app appers always app the APPIEST version, AppOS 10!
Apps!
It's all well and good making new standards for N-Base T,
but when will I get an upgrade for my ArcNet-over-barbed wire?
This new standard is very interesting: it employs the same coding and spectral density as 10GBase-T (6.25 bps/Hz), but it employs the available bandwidth (Hz) depending on the cable category: Cat.5e (100 MHz) can provide 2.5Gbps and Cat.6 (250 MHz) can provide 5 Gbps.
Interestingly, before this standard there was no practical use for Cat.6 cabling: any speed you could obtain using Cat.6 cable (1Gbps) could be also obtained using cat.5e, and if you wanted something faster (10Gbps) you needed Cat. 6A (500 MHz BW). This newly ratified standard finally gets some use from those extra MHz you have in Cat. 6, if you have installed it. It will be interesting to know if 802.3bz ports will be able to measure link bandwidth to adapt speed accordingly to 2.5/5Gbps.
For the Price of 10GB and 40GB, so I can get rid of those pesky (and expensive) Fibre Channel links to my storage!!!!
That has been in development for ages now...
Latency not whitstanding, that's what infiniband is for anyway!
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
SInce 1990 we were promised IDF closets would be a thing of the past.
Everyone would use wifi and VOIP by the year 2000. We all have fast cell phones so why can't our offices use the same?
http://saveie6.com/
I have been working with 2.5G for around a year now using a 2.5G physical interface chip from Aquantia that seamlessly handles everything from 100Mbps to 10Gbps including 1G, 2.5G and 5G. If the cable isn't too long I've run 10G over cat 5. Hopefully the prices will drop quickly once more companies support this standard since I just bought the cheapest 2.5G switch I could find, 8 ports for around $1200 for development purposes. It also interoperates fine with standard 1G equipment.
Aquantia is also nice is that unlike many phy chip vendors their phy SDK is free as in beer and is fully GPL and BSD compatible, though it will need to be re-written for the Linux kernel to follow the guidelines. I re-wrote it for U-Boot though I won't be able to push it upstream for a while yet. The chip I'm using even supports MACsec in hardware. There were two different 2.5G proposals, one from Broadcom and one from Aquantia. The Aquantia is the one that ultimately got accepted as the standard.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
This is cool, but ultimately irrelevant until someone forces the ISP's to admit there is no bandwidth shortage and do some high tier interchange upgrades. The current venal ISP's have spent millions convincing the FCC and customers there is a shortage of bandwidth so they can vastly overcharge for the 'available' bandwidth. As long as the cable companies won't compete and aren't interested in resolving the situation, most of us are stuck in a hell where 25 mbps is the best we can get on a good day.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
That's 5 GigaApps per second
I'm kind of struggling for what this is good for besides giving switch vendors a reason to push needless IDF upgrades and technology vendors yet another upcharge option.
1 gig Ethernet is already overkill for just about every desktop purpose and still has some useful life left in many data center applications, especially for lower performance areas, even in network storage.
The only place it becomes somewhat weak is in heavy use AC wireless deployments where it can be truly taxed, but most often even these deployments the vast majority of use reverts to the average of typical cabled clients.
It also feels like a reason to keep prices artificially high on 10 gig copper. 1 gig was sky high expensive when it first came out, but quickly became commoditized and very soon nearly everything came with 1 gig ports. 10 gig base T seems like it's been out for ages but prices really haven't dropped nearly as fast and I can't quite figure out why, other than it's fast enough to cut port densities by at least half while still providing 5x or greater throughput of 1 gig ports in most server deployments (ie, if you had 4x 1 gig ports and switch to 2x 10 gig ports, you have 20 gig aggregate vs. 4 gig aggregate and single stream throughput 10x the 1 gig solution).
And as usual, vendors can't stand the idea of the customer buying half of what they did before and getting 5-10x more value than they used to.
I guess the new standards will be great, but only if they replace 1 gig wherever you used to expect 1 gig, ie, everywhere. Otherwise it's either irrelevant or a new way to pay higher prices for 25-50% of the performance you should be getting out of 10 gig at the price -- or higher -- you ought to be paying for 10 gig these days.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
To add to what you said, it very much depends on length, and also on exactly how the termination is done (untwisted length, etc). Ten feet of CAT5 introduces less noise than 100 meters of CAT6.
Also, gigabit was actually designed to work over cat5, but barely.
If you frequently make a change to a 10GB file, check out rsync. It transfers only the bytes that changed, rather than the whole file. Basic usage:
rsync -av local/file.bin user@123.1.1.8:/home/remote/file.bin
Where the user has ssh access.
Folks,
For some more background on 2.5G/5G 802.3bz and NBASE-T, check out my blog post “What Can the NBASE-T Alliance Teach Us About the Standardization Process?” (http://www.nbaset.org/can-nbase-t-alliance-teach-us-standardization-process/)
Also look at the two white papers, “NBASE-T Ethernet Technology Basis for the IEEE 802.3bz Standard” (http://www.nbaset.org/technology/library/white-paper-1/) and “NBASE-T Performance and Cabling Guidelines” (http://www.nbaset.org/technology/library/white-paper-2/).
Cheers
Peter Jones
Chair, NBASE-T Alliance
Of course if that "large amounts of data" of data is multiple files, rsync doesn't have to read the unchanged the files. It can see by the file modification time and size that it matches the remote copy.
You mentioned ZFS, and offsite backup. For our business grade offsite backup and hot spare, we use LVM (logical volume manager). If you have a very large file, particularly a drive image, you'll get significantly better performance by creating it as a logical volume rather than as a file* on another filesystem, and LVM can easily list the blocks that have changed since the last snapshot. In fact, you don't even have to list the blocks, you can just transfer the copied-on-write parts directly because they are stored as a separate volume.
* A logical volume is of course still a file, because on *nix everything is a file. Whether you call it /home/ubuntu.img or /dev/mapper/images/ubuntu, it's a file either way, and you can do file things with it. By skipping the step of putting on ext4 filesystem underneath to hold this large file, you have less indirection and better performance, as well as enhanced data recovery options if bad things happen. (Having a filesystem inside another filesystem tends to confuse some data recovery operations).
PS:
> I've only tinkered with it in VM environments but I would like to give it a spin as an offsite backup sync solution.
In all my years on Slashdot I've never done this, but since you said you would like to give something like this a spin:
We've spent many years developing a pretty bad ass offsite backup solution based on this concept. One reason it's bad ass is that I found some cool ways to make it very efficient (cheap). You can boot up your backups live in our DC and SSH to them (or however you like to access them, they are exact replicas of the original, other than IP address). If your need is enough that you might be interested in spending about $30 / month for a really nice solution, let me know.
Backups are worthless if you don't know if the data is correct. You need end to end checksumming.
Do we have to start calling the old stuff 100MBASE-T now?
If both the source and destination are local disks, copying the file is faster than comparing, so it copies. Over a network, comparing byes is faster (unless your network is faster than your disks), so it when used over a network it compares bytes by default.
In fact it uses multiple hashes, called checksums in rsync lingo. It uses a very fast rolling checksum to quickly identify the parts that HAVE changed. It uses a more accurate, but slower checksum to verify the parts that have NOT changed.
Cat5e can do like 20 meters @ 10G and Cat6 30 meters @ 10G and you only need Cat6a/Cat7 if you want 10G @ 100M, which honestly I have to ask why you aren't just running a fiber drop at that length. Lower power consumption, similiar bend radius compared to conduit grade ethernet cable, and most importantly: no electrical signals that can be snooped on from outside the premises or intermittent interference due to cable length.
Seriously, how many people here still use ethernet as their long distance backhaul rather than fiber?