Eric Frost writes "From Directions Magazine: 'Because it is now impossible to sell networking unless it is called Ethernet (regardless of the actual protocols used), it is likely that 1 Terabit Ethernet and even 10 Terabit Ethernet (using 100 wavelengths used by 100 gigabit per second transmitter / receiver pairs) may soon be announced. Only a protocol name change is needed. And the name change is merely the acknowledgment that Ethernet protocols can tunnel through other protocols (and vice versa).'"
From the article: "iSCSI (Internet SCSI) over Ethernet is replacing: *SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface..."
iSCSI is far superior to stadard SCSI for obvious reasons, and its widespread adoption will really spark a massive gain in the SAN (Storage Area Network) market. The technology is there, now we just need more major vendors of SCSI devices (especially storage and image filing systems) to make more SCSI devices that support iSCSI natively and applications that take advantage of it. Combined with practical solutions from vendors of network storage software like Veritas we could see some major spending in IT. And more money being spent on IT is always a good thing.
I don't keep up much with the progress of the Ethernet technologies at hand, so is it realistic to suppose that the practical implementation/creation of 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 1 Terabit Ethernet, and 10 Terabit Ethernet will be seperated by merely two years each?
"Because it is now impossible to sell networking unless it is called Ethernet". Incorrect. You can easily sell network gear that is tagged with the "WiFi" designation.
iSCSI is NOT far superior to SCSI, or fibrechannel. iSCSI has massive issues related to deterministic latency, and computational cost of processing TCP/IP at gigabit speeds. You may see some growth in the of iSCSI in the workgroup segment, but I don't see iSCSI replacing fc/scsi in the near future for mission critical computing.
You forget that ethernet equipment is superior and cheaper. For instance you can use a pair of Cisco 6509's with 10Gb blades and use redundant NIC's (even pair them up if you like with channel bonding) and get a SAN infrastructure that beats anything FC in throughput, reliability, and it won't cost more than a decent 2Gb FC setup. If TCP processing is actually an issue then use offloading NIC's (though they rarely beat Linux's software implementation in spead).
Yet more big advantages to iSCSI are the ability to keep the
large,
noisy,
power-hungry,
heat-generating,
unsecure
disks out of workstations in workers' offices and down the hall in a
sound-proof,
secure,
air-conditioned,
UPS'd server room with
mirrored images,
archival backups
.
Next thing you know, GPUs will come with on-board Ethernet controllers and USB plugs for keyboard and mouse, and be built in to the back of an LCD monitor.
Good point. Most users are total morons and think they need more power and storage than their work warrants. However, only time will truly tell if iSCSI will really be the "winner" in all of this. I couldn't find the link for an open source project the I'd seen before that would actually export SCSI, USB and Firewire over IP, so here's this [aol.com]
EMC is now supporting iSCSI in their high-end Symmetrix DMX storage systems. It's just a matter of time before all storage vendors offer this. It's also just a matter of time before network cards that can talk native iSCSI are available (allowing you to boot from iSCSI, among other things).
[Note: I work for EMC and am friends with the iSCSI developers, so my views are a bit biased.]
Ok dial home when sick this is an important function last I checked I like to know when drives fail. It's not a question of is it important I just hate being lied to, and in the case of the laptop I would call that thing a bit more than a straight laptop with a propiatary looking PC-Card along with ethernet.
I call it a secret tool when they dont provide it when they drop of a testing rig. Twice they have done this to me. It's not exectly like it's easy to find or well marked either I had to get out a st
I don't keep up much with the progress of the Ethernet technologies at hand, so is it realistic to suppose that the practical implementation/creation of 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 1 Terabit Ethernet, and 10 Terabit Ethernet will be seperated by merely two years each?
I think not. 10 GbE hasn't exactly taken the world by storm and it's been around for over a year now. I know of products that have 10 GbE ports, but I have not witnessed an abundance of demand. To be nice the author of this article is just a little facetious in his claims.
In reality if you read the article it's hard to even take him seriously. To say that Nortel's DWDM system is ethernet is like calling your 56k modem ethernet. Yeah, so you can pass ethernet frames on it. It's not standard, it's not documented anywhere in IEEE 802.anything (esp with regards to conformance), so it's NOT ethernet. Just passing ethernet frames does not make you an ethernet device. I'm honestly not really sure what the author's point is except that he seems to think 1) ethernet is increasingly popular, 2) everyone should want to carry ethernet frames, and 3) people want bigger and bigger pipes. The first 2 are true, the third is less true now than it was 3 years ago.
So the answer is, it wouldn't surprise me if we see 10 Terabit links by 2010, I doubt very, very much that we'll see a 10 Terabit ethernet port on a single chassis ethernet switch with 100 Terabits of switching capacity. I could be wrong, I hope I am, but it doesn't seem reasonable.
One would think that if they have a device that could route such traffic, then it must have some sort of bus/hardware capable of handling it. Somwhere along the line this traffic has to hit a node-point, right?
Now really, I don't see much point in directing 10Tb ethernet to one machine anyhow. But it would be great for large node-points. I you think about 100Mbps, generally no single machine is going to use that much in a normal network. However, many machines will, and sometimes quite easily in large sit
I guess there will only be one computer, at this time : a virtual computer distributed over millions of physical nodes, so the storage will might be each of these nodes' memory... Like Freenet but also aimed at distributing workload.
Will it be meant for actual LAN usage? I think it's being designed more for back-bone-like reasons. I can't even get my drives to transfer large amounts of data back and forth in a reasonable time, so I can't see the need unless we go to entirely solid state drives.
but... imagine a beowulf cluster interconnected by lines of these...;)
People/institutions with large storage arrays. Lan parties are, in a lot of ways, hindered by bandwidth. We have a monthly thing in town here that is pushing the limits of the 100mb switches and GE backbone. Watching multiple streams of HDTV video from the media server in your basement. Networking processors from different workstations to provide a little more processing power.
You'd probably not do a thing. But I know the internal network lines at my Uni (left this summer) are glowing pushing 1Gbit, the main backbone is now 10Gbit I think. And keeping the internal network fast (not to mention, look the other way) keeps the external connection from getting squished. If 10Tbit is available in 2010, they'll probably go for something like that. It doesn't take many student's homes to create huge amounts of traffic...
Will there be a computer with a bus that can transmit data that fast? To hell with read/write - I'll concede it's all in memory. I don't think computers will be able to do (10^13)/64 bus cycles by 2010, assuming Moore's is loosely adhered to. As I calculate it, 7 years at 1.5 years/doubling cycle leaves 4.8 doubling cycles. Assuming a top speed of 3 GHz and 64 bit architecture, 1 get 1E13bits/(64bits/clock)/((2^4.8)*3E9clocks) = 1.87, or 87% overcapacity.
And that assumes that transfer occurs at chip speed, which it doesn't. Assuming a modest clock multiplier of 8 between system bus and chip, that's a 15x overcapacity, even if the entire computer were used to transmit.
Bandwidth doesn't necessarily help play games with very little delay. For quick responses in games, you need low one-way latency. A network may be capable of throwing out 1000 zillion bytes/second, but if it takes too long to send out the first packet, the game isn't going to work very well. One-way latency is way more important than bandwidth when the goal is to send out many small packets as soon as possible. High bandwidth would greatly speed up large downloads, but for faster response in games, etc, lower latency is what you need.
yes and no, while latency is obviously a big factor in your online experience, having unlimited bandwidth means that you could afford to send to the clients every single position for every actor (including orientation etc.) and moveable object instead of having to rely excessively on client-side compensation and prediction.
While the perceived lag would remain pretty much the same, you'd be sure that the client-represented world would be much closer to the 'server world' than it is now.
and then the aimbots and see-through-wall hacks become even more effective, as they can track every single player in the screen at all times.
To solve the cheating problem "once and for all", you can render the picture on the server and just send that 1024x768 bitmap 60 times per second.:) Try to see-through that!
Actually, bandwidth and route have everything to do with latency.
The efficiency of the routers / backbones you encounter is always a factor, and if one router in the chain takes forever to respond, it's going to kill your latency.
Your packet has a certain size, and the time it takes to completely transmit that packet and complete the ack is your latency. Distance and bandwidth are the prime factors.
Sure your packets travel fast on a fiber backbone, but if your last mile connection is several orders of magnitude slower ( broadband or dialup ), it's going to cause a significant increase in your latency.
Even high bandwidth cannot save you from real distance. You try to play a game on the other side of the US, you're going to add a sizeable delay even with those high-bandwidth backbones. Gaming with a server on another continent? It becomes largely unplayable.
Bandwidth is good, but what about latency? Ethernet has traditionally suffered from high latencies and doesn't work very well for High-Performance-Computing-Clusters. Myrinet and other ridiculously overpriced networking hardware works much better for clustering. I wish terabit ethernet does something about ethernet latency so that efficient clustering becomes a little cheaper.
Uh oh, guess how myrinet, quadrics and scali achieve their indeed impressively low latency? By having special user-space MPI libraries that access the hardware directly, without the kernel. And of course, they dont use the IP protocol, but some proprietary protocol designed specifically for cluster use (as simple as possible e.g. no routing)
So, unfortunately the technology used for cluster interconnects is totally non-general purpose. Actually it's more or less useless unless you have a MPI application.
100 ms latency would affect a 10Mbps network and a 10 Tbps network almost equally if a clustered application is using very small packets to communicate. Only if the application is using very large packets, the bandwidth will overcome the latency. At small packet sizes the latency will largely overshadow the bandwidth. And considering that a lot of scientific applications use small payloads, latency is very important.
If ethernet wants acceptance in the High-Performance-Computing-Clusters world, something has to be done about the latency.
Now take the same server, and instead of transfering a 1GB file, send a 4k message for a DSM page update, or a filesystem locking operation (4k is generous). Which network is effectively faster then? Transferring large files is far from the only use of networks. Latency *is* important, and ethernet latencies have not gotten the exponential speed boosts that the bandwidth has.
Clustering and LAN file servers are two common uses for networks that won't benifit much by increasing bandwidth beyond 2gbps compare
The article is already slashdotted so I can't read it. So what is it refering to? 10Tb LAN speeds? If so - who cares? My existing 100Mb (200Mb switched full duplex) LAN is hardly the weakest link.
Every kind of networking is coming together: LANs (Local Area Networks), SANs (Storage / System Area Networks), telephony, cable TV, inter-city optical fiber links, etc., but if you don't call it Ethernet you cannot sell it. Your networking must also include a reference to IP (Internet Protocol) to be marketable.
Above 10 Gigabit Ethernet lies 100 Gigabit Ethernet. The fastest commercial bit rate on a fiber transmitter/receiver pair is 80 Gigabits per second. Each Ethernet speed increase must be an order of magnitude (a factor of 10) to be worth the effort to incorporate a change, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet has not been commercially possible with a simple bit multiplexing solution, but NTT has solved this problem and has the first 100 Gigabit per second chip to begin a 10 Gigabit system [http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news02e/0212/021204.htm l]. Currently, Nortel Networks offers DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) where 160 of the 40 Gigabit transmitter/receiver pairs are used to transmit 160 wavelengths (infrared colors) on the same fiber yielding a composite, multi-channel, bandwidth of 6.4 terabits per second. Because it is now impossible to sell networking unless it is called Ethernet (regardless of the actual protocols used), it is likely that 1 Terabit Ethernet and even 10 Terabit Ethernet (using 100 wavelengths used by 100 gigabit per second transmitter / receiver pairs) may soon be announced. Only a protocol name change is needed. And the name change is merely the acknowledgment that Ethernet protocols can tunnel through other protocols (such as DWDM) (and vice versa). In fact, Atrica has been advertising such a multiplexed version of 100 Gigabit Ethernet since 2001. [http://www.atrica.com/products/a_8000.html] Now that NTT has announced a reliable 100 Gigabit per second transmitter/receiver pair, the progression may be 1 wavelength for 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 10 wavelength (10 x 100 Gigabits per second) CWDM (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing) for 1 Terabit Ethernet, and 100 wavelength (100 x 100 Gigabits per second) DWDM for 10 Terabit per second Ethernet in the near future.
iSCSI (Internet SCSI) over Ethernet is replacing: *SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface, in 1979 it was Shugart Associates Systems Interface: *SASI), *FC (Fibre Channel), and even *ATA (IBM PC AT Attachment) aka (also known as) *IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) *see [http://www.pcguide.com], Ethernet is replacing ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), Sonet (Synchronous Optical NETwork), POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service, which is being replaced with Gigabit Ethernet to the home in Grant County, Washington, USA ) [see references from Cisco Systems 1, 2, 3, or 4] [www.wwp.com], *PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect local bus), Infiniband, and every other protocol, because, as described above, if you don't call it Ethernet you cannot sell it. Everything, in every type of, communications must now also include a reference to IP (Internet Protocol) for the same reason.
At the same time that the transmitter / receiver pairs are getting faster, and DWMD is adding channels, the capacity of fibers is increasing, as is the transmission distance available without repeaters. Omni-Guide [http://www.omni-guide.com/; then click on enter] is working on fibers that "could substantially reduce or even eliminate the need for amplifiers in optical networks. Secondly it will offer a bandwidth capacity that could potentially be several orders of magnitude greater than conventional single-mode optical fibers." Eliminating
Pretty cool for LANs, but otherwise rather useless.
We already have gigabit Ethernet - which (even rounding down somewhat to account for checksum and overhead and such) should be capable of transferring around 100 megabytes of data per second. How many of us have ever seen even 10% of this in practice for a general Internet connection? I'm lucky if I can pull one megabyte per second from an Internet site that doesn't happen to be, y'know, next door.
"Pretty cool for LANs, but otherwise rather useless."
Useless? My company could use it right about now. We've got a video system moving massive amounts of imagery through several machines. There's encoding, decoding, image processing, and all kinds of fun stuff going on. Our ethernet backbone is the bottleneck. We running at a gigabit and it barely keeps up. We've had to severely compress the video to keep up. With 10 terabits, (maybe even 1 terabit) we'd be able to do it all uncompressed. That'd b
Gigabit ethernet, and 10 gigabit ethernet both have it in their specs to accomodate 100 ethernet and 10 ethernet. Therefore 10 Tb ethernet will be called 10000000/1000000/100000/10000/1000/100/10Base T for the OTHER technologies included. The chip will be bigger unless its fancy FPGAing with the FPGA code downloaded from the driver.
So to sell it as Ethernet they have to make it compatible as such. Or to make things cheaper, they will have to settle on a different name to sell cheaper 10Tb cards only. Cheaper 10Tb cards will sell more than compatible ones.
These high speed DWDM systems talked about in this article aren't designed to be used for LANs or home internet connections - they are meant for high speed backbones that span huge distances (such as across the US or Australia).
They carry mutiple 10Gb/s or 40Gb/s channels on one fibre pair - and these individual channels can be added or removed as necessary, and can be treated independantly. Saying this, 10Gb/s is still a lot, and generally that needs to be broken down into more managable sections, such as gigabit copper ethernet or maybe even 100Mb/s.
It may seem like overkill, but at the core of most networks, there is a distinct lack of bandwidth. Maybe the VOD and video calling predicted 10 years back won't happen on these networks, but more applications are requiring these huge amounts of bandwidth.
An example of this sort of system being rolled out is the Marconi Solstis system in Australia [fibre-systems.com]. A very small part of that system was designed by me:)
I am sure packetengines (http://www.scyld.com/network/yellowfin.html) is all over this. These guys had gigabit routers four years ago when I was helping to set up the AFN (ashlandfiber.com)
I am an EE major and when I was going to university in the late 80s early 90s everybody was going on how fiber was the future and that we'd run out of capacity on copper RealSoonNow: who'd have thought about 10TERABIT ethernet back then! (heck, I was happy as a clam when my lab upgraded from coax to baseT so the jokers couldn't bring down my box by unscrewing their terminators...)
Lucent was selling their all-optical DWDM switches (Lambda Series) last year. The LambdaXtreme is a 40 Gbps DWDM unit that uses micro-mirrors (MEMS) for switching. Data is not converted to electricity, but stays as photons the entire route. It is capable of sending data through optical fibers for 1,000 KM *without regeneration* and at 4,000 KM *without regeneration* at reduced (10 Gbps) speeds.
They sold a pair of units (and you have to buy at least 2 or they are useless) to Time-Warner. There is one on the East Coast and one on the West and it forms a major part of their cross-country backbone.
8-10 of the units were sold to Korea (South) for use in wiring up their national rail systems. I also believe NTT DoCoMo (Japan) bought a couple.
This is all last year. Since I'm no longer with that company (layoffs), I no longer get all the product updates. These units were in my product group for install, service and support.
"Robert Metcalf [the inventor of Ethernet] says that if something comes along to replace Ethernet, it will be called "Ethernet", so therefore Ethernet will never die. Unix has already undergone several such transformations."
-- Ken Thompson
Here is the page in the manuscript with the quote [catb.org].
My apologies for both the recursive quoting and name dropping.
I'll stop trolling here after I get this out: stop thinking this has anything to do with your top-of-the-line, supergeekin' Athlon.
This technology is namely meant for backbones, be it on a campus level or as a longer haul backbone. Obviously, your desktop will not need to transfer anywhere near that much data within the next, say, 25 years. If you were using your head while you were reading the (albiet poorly written) article, I wouldn't have to troll.:(
Yes, in 1995 no one thought there was a call for 100BT to the desktop either. And in 2002, no one thought there was a need for GigE to the desktop either.
(I write this after I just did a 500 Mbps ftp transfer of a 7GB video file over GigE...)
In 1995 there was a call for 100BT links trust me I was there were were doing it earlier than that. In 2002 GigE over copper was there and my persoanly first installation of GigE to the desktop was 1998. So far the PC could arguably handle them GigE pushed the PCI bus to breaking and 10GigE will do the same for PCI-X for a few years to come. Now granted I wholeheartedly agree that untill a lot of issues are worked out you wont be seeing fiber the the normal desktop.
23 thousand streams of 24bit x 1600*1200pix x 75hz uncompressed
1.5k byte packets at 670 million/sec
2 billion x 50 byte packets per sec
port scan all ports on all IPv4 addresses in 20 minutes
Every US resident downloads Metallical's new track in 30 minutes of my http server
And this will all be available at Fry's for a $50 NIC and $30 cable ? When ? I'll hold off buying any new network HW 'till then:^)
Seriously, there are some significant implications here. For 1, you won't need a monitor connected directly to the "fast video card" to get the next fancy 3D graphics features. Memory bandwidth and network bandwidth will be similar meaning that clustered NUMA systems will be interesting. Some of the design decisions we deal with today have been because getting the person close to the computer to improve the experience was a critical factor will disappear.
Basically I don't see the technology being developed any faster than 3-4 years because as it stands, home main stream still opperates at DSL connections of 10mb and home networks run at 100mbs. As far as the business world goes, the majority of companies I have had the opportunity of working at run only 100mb networks with IT "thinking/testing" going 1gb.
In short - there is NO demand for 10gb networks currently and especially NO demand for 100gb let alone a freakin terrabyte pipe. Although those things are "nice" and very "cool", there is not a big enough demand/NEED for this kind of transfer - YET.
You could also use the analogy of the current PC market. There is not a big demand for new systems right now because even for business use a P4 1.6ghz with 512mb of mem runs everything work and game related fine. As soon as something comes out that REQUIRES/needs more power THEN you will see a rise in pc sales.
iSCSI bascially takes native SCSI commands, wraps it up (encapsulates it), and sends it over the wire. In other words, you could use a SCSI scanner over a network without having to resort to PC Anywhere or something.
Interestingly enough, if you did it wouldn't be a very big success because the internal PCI or PCI-X bus in the system would bottleneck the interconnects. The NICs would need on-board processors to scale with their enormous bandwidth potential so that they could solve problems like matching checksums and other package management tasks and not have to pound on the system bus so hard.
It wasn't long ago that we really started exploiting video chipsets for rendering graphics, either...
As I understand it, low-voltage cables like Ethernet and telephone wires do not need conduits. What they do need, however, is to be plenum-grade if they go into a "forced air space" like an air conditioning duct. It's also probably a bad idea to bring them through a hole in the ceiling of your wiring closet like I did:) in my install. But I don't have a good replacement idea other than a bunch of holes drilled from the top of the wall and brought out through a box on the wa
Good stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article: "iSCSI (Internet SCSI) over Ethernet is replacing: *SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface..."
iSCSI is far superior to stadard SCSI for obvious reasons, and its widespread adoption will really spark a massive gain in the SAN (Storage Area Network) market. The technology is there, now we just need more major vendors of SCSI devices (especially storage and image filing systems) to make more SCSI devices that support iSCSI natively and applications that take advantage of it. Combined with practical solutions from vendors of network storage software like Veritas we could see some major spending in IT. And more money being spent on IT is always a good thing.
I don't keep up much with the progress of the Ethernet technologies at hand, so is it realistic to suppose that the practical implementation/creation of 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 1 Terabit Ethernet, and 10 Terabit Ethernet will be seperated by merely two years each?
"Because it is now impossible to sell networking unless it is called Ethernet". Incorrect. You can easily sell network gear that is tagged with the "WiFi" designation.
Re:Good stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Good stuff (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Good stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
iSCSI
A really nice development.
Yet more big advantages to iSCSI are the ability to keep the
- large,
- noisy,
- power-hungry,
- heat-generating,
- unsecure
disks out of workstations in workers' offices and down the hall in a- sound-proof,
- secure,
- air-conditioned,
- UPS'd server room with
- mirrored images,
- archival backups
.Next thing you know, GPUs will come with on-board Ethernet controllers and USB plugs for keyboard and mouse, and be built in to the back of an LCD monitor.
Parent
Re:Good stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
[Note: I work for EMC and am friends with the iSCSI developers, so my views are a bit biased.]
Re:Good stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
I call it a secret tool when they dont provide it when they drop of a testing rig. Twice they have done this to me. It's not exectly like it's easy to find or well marked either I had to get out a st
Re:Good stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
I think not. 10 GbE hasn't exactly taken the world by storm and it's been around for over a year now. I know of products that have 10 GbE ports, but I have not witnessed an abundance of demand. To be nice the author of this article is just a little facetious in his claims.
In reality if you read the article it's hard to even take him seriously. To say that Nortel's DWDM system is ethernet is like calling your 56k modem ethernet. Yeah, so you can pass ethernet frames on it. It's not standard, it's not documented anywhere in IEEE 802.anything (esp with regards to conformance), so it's NOT ethernet. Just passing ethernet frames does not make you an ethernet device. I'm honestly not really sure what the author's point is except that he seems to think 1) ethernet is increasingly popular, 2) everyone should want to carry ethernet frames, and 3) people want bigger and bigger pipes. The first 2 are true, the third is less true now than it was 3 years ago.
So the answer is, it wouldn't surprise me if we see 10 Terabit links by 2010, I doubt very, very much that we'll see a 10 Terabit ethernet port on a single chassis ethernet switch with 100 Terabits of switching capacity. I could be wrong, I hope I am, but it doesn't seem reasonable.
Parent
Re:Good stuff (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably not. But I could definitely see it being useful for top-end server systems with hugely parallel storage and memory access.
Parent
Routing (Score:3, Interesting)
Now really, I don't see much point in directing 10Tb ethernet to one machine anyhow. But it would be great for large node-points. I you think about 100Mbps, generally no single machine is going to use that much in a normal network. However, many machines will, and sometimes quite easily in large sit
Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet? (Score:4, Interesting)
but
-Ab
Parent
Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet? (Score:5, Funny)
Lan parties are, in a lot of ways, hindered by bandwidth. We have a monthly thing in town here that is pushing the limits of the 100mb switches and GE backbone.
Watching multiple streams of HDTV video from the media server in your basement.
Networking processors from different workstations to provide a little more processing power.
And most importantly.
Haptic porn.
Parent
Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet? (Score:4, Informative)
Kjella
Parent
Better question... (Score:5, Interesting)
And that assumes that transfer occurs at chip speed, which it doesn't. Assuming a modest clock multiplier of 8 between system bus and chip, that's a 15x overcapacity, even if the entire computer were used to transmit.
Parent
Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet? (Score:3, Insightful)
While the perceived lag would remain pretty much the same, you'd be sure that the client-represented world would be much closer to the 'server world' than it is now.
Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet? (Score:5, Funny)
To solve the cheating problem "once and for all", you can render the picture on the server and just send that 1024x768 bitmap 60 times per second.
Parent
Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet? (Score:5, Interesting)
The efficiency of the routers / backbones you encounter is always a factor, and if one router in the chain takes forever to respond, it's going to kill your latency.
Your packet has a certain size, and the time it takes to completely transmit that packet and complete the ack is your latency. Distance and bandwidth are the prime factors.
Sure your packets travel fast on a fiber backbone, but if your last mile connection is several orders of magnitude slower ( broadband or dialup ), it's going to cause a significant increase in your latency.
Even high bandwidth cannot save you from real distance. You try to play a game on the other side of the US, you're going to add a sizeable delay even with those high-bandwidth backbones. Gaming with a server on another continent? It becomes largely unplayable.
Parent
What about latency? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about latency? (Score:3, Informative)
So, unfortunately the technology used for cluster interconnects is totally non-general purpose. Actually it's more or less useless unless you have a MPI application.
Re:What about latency? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:What about latency? (Score:3, Interesting)
Clustering and LAN file servers are two common uses for networks that won't benifit much by increasing bandwidth beyond 2gbps compare
Salad (Score:3, Insightful)
LAN or Internet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LAN or Internet? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about those interested in clustering and not interested in paying for expensive solutions (that now exist because of high latency in ethernet)?
How about those that are interested in having a network other than their home network where 100 or 1000Mb is just not enough?
The home market isn't the ONLY market available for networking you know. Especially with FL thinking about taxing it
Re:100Mb full duplex, switched to the desktop. (Score:3, Funny)
Article Text (Score:4, Informative)
By: Steve Gilheany
(Aug 27, 2003)
Ethernet Timeline
* 10 Megabit Ethernet 1990*
* 100 Megabit Ethernet 1995
* 1 Gigabit Ethernet 1998
* 10 Gigabit Ethernet 2002
* 100 Gigabit Ethernet 2006**
* 1 Terabit Ethernet 2008**
* 10 Terabit Ethernet 2010**
* Invented 1976, 10BaseT 1990
** projected
Every kind of networking is coming together: LANs (Local Area Networks), SANs (Storage / System Area Networks), telephony, cable TV, inter-city optical fiber links, etc., but if you don't call it Ethernet you cannot sell it. Your networking must also include a reference to IP (Internet Protocol) to be marketable.
Above 10 Gigabit Ethernet lies 100 Gigabit Ethernet. The fastest commercial bit rate on a fiber transmitter/receiver pair is 80 Gigabits per second. Each Ethernet speed increase must be an order of magnitude (a factor of 10) to be worth the effort to incorporate a change, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet has not been commercially possible with a simple bit multiplexing solution, but NTT has solved this problem and has the first 100 Gigabit per second chip to begin a 10 Gigabit system [http://www.ntt.co.jp/news/news02e/0212/021204.htm l]. Currently, Nortel Networks offers DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) where 160 of the 40 Gigabit transmitter/receiver pairs are used to transmit 160 wavelengths (infrared colors) on the same fiber yielding a composite, multi-channel, bandwidth of 6.4 terabits per second. Because it is now impossible to sell networking unless it is called Ethernet (regardless of the actual protocols used), it is likely that 1 Terabit Ethernet and even 10 Terabit Ethernet (using 100 wavelengths used by 100 gigabit per second transmitter / receiver pairs) may soon be announced. Only a protocol name change is needed. And the name change is merely the acknowledgment that Ethernet protocols can tunnel through other protocols (such as DWDM) (and vice versa). In fact, Atrica has been advertising such a multiplexed version of 100 Gigabit Ethernet since 2001. [http://www.atrica.com/products/a_8000.html] Now that NTT has announced a reliable 100 Gigabit per second transmitter/receiver pair, the progression may be 1 wavelength for 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 10 wavelength (10 x 100 Gigabits per second) CWDM (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing) for 1 Terabit Ethernet, and 100 wavelength (100 x 100 Gigabits per second) DWDM for 10 Terabit per second Ethernet in the near future.
iSCSI (Internet SCSI) over Ethernet is replacing: *SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface, in 1979 it was Shugart Associates Systems Interface: *SASI), *FC (Fibre Channel), and even *ATA (IBM PC AT Attachment) aka (also known as) *IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) *see [http://www.pcguide.com], Ethernet is replacing ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), Sonet (Synchronous Optical NETwork), POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service, which is being replaced with Gigabit Ethernet to the home in Grant County, Washington, USA ) [see references from Cisco Systems 1, 2, 3, or 4] [www.wwp.com], *PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect local bus), Infiniband, and every other protocol, because, as described above, if you don't call it Ethernet you cannot sell it. Everything, in every type of, communications must now also include a reference to IP (Internet Protocol) for the same reason.
At the same time that the transmitter / receiver pairs are getting faster, and DWMD is adding channels, the capacity of fibers is increasing, as is the transmission distance available without repeaters. Omni-Guide [http://www.omni-guide.com/; then click on enter] is working on fibers that "could substantially reduce or even eliminate the need for amplifiers in optical networks. Secondly it will offer a bandwidth capacity that could potentially be several orders of magnitude greater than conventional single-mode optical fibers." Eliminating
Name Change (Score:3, Funny)
We already have gigabit... (Score:3, Insightful)
We already have gigabit Ethernet - which (even rounding down somewhat to account for checksum and overhead and such) should be capable of transferring around 100 megabytes of data per second. How many of us have ever seen even 10% of this in practice for a general Internet connection? I'm lucky if I can pull one megabyte per second from an Internet site that doesn't happen to be, y'know, next door.
- David Stein
Re:We already have gigabit... (Score:3, Informative)
Useless? My company could use it right about now. We've got a video system moving massive amounts of imagery through several machines. There's encoding, decoding, image processing, and all kinds of fun stuff going on. Our ethernet backbone is the bottleneck. We running at a gigabit and it barely keeps up. We've had to severely compress the video to keep up. With 10 terabits, (maybe even 1 terabit) we'd be able to do it all uncompressed. That'd b
Not just a name change (Score:5, Funny)
So to sell it as Ethernet they have to make it compatible as such. Or to make things cheaper, they will have to settle on a different name to sell cheaper 10Tb cards only. Cheaper 10Tb cards will sell more than compatible ones.
In the year 2010... (Score:3, Funny)
Will 10 Terabits be enough... (Score:5, Funny)
Uses of high speed links (Score:5, Informative)
These high speed DWDM systems talked about in this article aren't designed to be used for LANs or home internet connections - they are meant for high speed backbones that span huge distances (such as across the US or Australia).
They carry mutiple 10Gb/s or 40Gb/s channels on one fibre pair - and these individual channels can be added or removed as necessary, and can be treated independantly. Saying this, 10Gb/s is still a lot, and generally that needs to be broken down into more managable sections, such as gigabit copper ethernet or maybe even 100Mb/s.
It may seem like overkill, but at the core of most networks, there is a distinct lack of bandwidth. Maybe the VOD and video calling predicted 10 years back won't happen on these networks, but more applications are requiring these huge amounts of bandwidth.
An example of this sort of system being rolled out is the Marconi Solstis system in Australia [fibre-systems.com]. A very small part of that system was designed by me :)
packetengines (Score:4, Interesting)
These guys had gigabit routers four years ago when I was helping to set up the AFN (ashlandfiber.com)
Cool to see.. mo'faster is mo'betta
it's funny... (Score:5, Funny)
Who needs this? Answer... (Score:5, Informative)
They sold a pair of units (and you have to buy at least 2 or they are useless) to Time-Warner. There is one on the East Coast and one on the West and it forms a major part of their cross-country backbone.
8-10 of the units were sold to Korea (South) for use in wiring up their national rail systems. I also believe NTT DoCoMo (Japan) bought a couple.
This is all last year. Since I'm no longer with that company (layoffs), I no longer get all the product updates. These units were in my product group for install, service and support.
I'll bet you all ... (Score:3, Funny)
Cheers,
-- RLJ
Durability of Ethernet (Score:5, Funny)
My apologies for both the recursive quoting and name dropping.
Attn Geeks: This is not for your desktop (Score:5, Informative)
This technology is namely meant for backbones, be it on a campus level or as a longer haul backbone. Obviously, your desktop will not need to transfer anywhere near that much data within the next, say, 25 years. If you were using your head while you were reading the (albiet poorly written) article, I wouldn't have to troll.
Re:Attn Geeks: This is not for your desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
(I write this after I just did a 500 Mbps ftp transfer of a 7GB video file over GigE...)
Re:Attn Geeks: This is not for your desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
As an asside I think the funniest part
Just to get this into perspectivc (Score:5, Informative)
10Tb/s means
5 million 2Mb/sec compressed video streams
Copy a 250GB drive in 1/4sec
23 thousand streams of 24bit x 1600*1200pix x 75hz uncompressed
1.5k byte packets at 670 million/sec
2 billion x 50 byte packets per sec
port scan all ports on all IPv4 addresses in 20 minutes
Every US resident downloads Metallical's new track in 30 minutes of my http server
And this will all be available at Fry's for a $50 NIC and $30 cable ? When ? I'll hold off buying any new network HW 'till then :^)
Seriously, there are some significant implications here. For 1, you won't need a monitor connected directly to the "fast video card" to get the next fancy 3D graphics features. Memory bandwidth and network bandwidth will be similar meaning that clustered NUMA systems will be interesting. Some of the design decisions we deal with today have been because getting the person close to the computer to improve the experience was a critical factor will disappear.
I like patterns, but this doesn't make sense... (Score:3, Insightful)
10 Megabit Ethernet 1990*
(5 years)
* 100 Megabit Ethernet 1995
(3 years)
* 1 Gigabit Ethernet 1998
(4 years)
* 10 Gigabit Ethernet 2002
(4 years)
* 100 Gigabit Ethernet 2006**
(2 years)
* 1 Terabit Ethernet 2008**
(2 years)
* 10 Terabit Ethernet 2010**
I think this would be more accurate though:
* 100 Gigabit Ethernet 2006**
(3 years)
* 1 Terabit Ethernet 2009**
(3 years)
* 10 Terabit Ethernet 2012**
Basically I don't see the technology being developed any faster than 3-4 years because as it stands, home main stream still opperates at DSL connections of 10mb and home networks run at 100mbs. As far as the business world goes, the majority of companies I have had the opportunity of working at run only 100mb networks with IT "thinking/testing" going 1gb.
In short - there is NO demand for 10gb networks currently and especially NO demand for 100gb let alone a freakin terrabyte pipe. Although those things are "nice" and very "cool", there is not a big enough demand/NEED for this kind of transfer - YET.
You could also use the analogy of the current PC market. There is not a big demand for new systems right now because even for business use a P4 1.6ghz with 512mb of mem runs everything work and game related fine. As soon as something comes out that REQUIRES/needs more power THEN you will see a rise in pc sales.
Re:iSCSI???!?? Firewire? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:boy! If you could build a Beowolf Cluster of th (Score:4, Interesting)
It wasn't long ago that we really started exploiting video chipsets for rendering graphics, either...
Parent
Re:Cabling? (Score:3, Informative)
As I understand it, low-voltage cables like Ethernet and telephone wires do not need conduits. What they do need, however, is to be plenum-grade if they go into a "forced air space" like an air conditioning duct. It's also probably a bad idea to bring them through a hole in the ceiling of your wiring closet like I did :) in my install. But I don't have a good replacement idea other than a bunch of holes drilled from the top of the wall and brought out through a box on the wa