10 Terabit Ethernet By 2010

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).'"

What about latency?

[Brahmastra]

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.

Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet?

[isorox]

You wont do anything to your desktop, however (with the right switches and routers) you can have 100,000 100mbit desktops running at full speed.

Salad

[Anonymous Coward]

What is that article actually supposed to be about? Seems like a scrambled mess of acronymic buzzwords with no actual content to me.

LAN or Internet?

[blixel]

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.

We already have gigabit...

[tambo]

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.

- David Stein

Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet?

[MarcoAtWork]

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.

Re:And what am I going to do with 10TB ethernet?

[PainKilleR-CE]

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.

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.

Most client-side compensation and prediction is latency compensation anyway.

Re:Good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

There is however and inheirant and show stopping problemt with all the over ethernet type storage schemes (yes I am looking at you NetApp ya lieing sons-of-....). That problem is that the market currently does not have a feasible TOE (tcp/ip offload engine) card to actually give us any performance.

Right now you're wasting your time putting more than a single 1 Gbps ethernet card into an Intel server for anything other than redundancy as the servers can't even drive that.

Until we have the protocol handled in hardware rather than system software you simply won't get anything resembling decent performance out of it.

Re:Attn Geeks: This is not for your desktop

[TheSync]

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...)

I like patterns, but this doesn't make sense...

[greymond]

From the article they have a snippet at the top that goes like this - i've added the years in between on my own:

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:Good stuff

[Feynman]

is it realistic to suppose . . . 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 agree wholeheartedly. Not only is demand for 10 GbE optics (here [jdsu.com], here [intel.com], and here [finisar.com]) weak -- it took approximately 2 years for IEEE to ratify the standard (802.3ae).

Re:Good stuff

[silas_moeckel]

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 step ladder to find it. Everybody else has allways given me a key and been more than willing to take me on a tour of the hardware EMC never seems to be willing to open up the box even under NDA is this redundancy through obscurity?

You install a decent array of hardware I've never had as many issues than with EMC not generaly technical but straight forward PR lies and half truths. How many times has Sun given you the quote unquote 100% redundant system and have you found it lacking? Or NetApp for that matter. HP has never wanted to come to the table (Compaq has plenty of times) for a side by side test nor has HDS at least in my experience so I cant talk to there gear.

BTW I dont manage these systems I test them meaning they come in I provide a spec to be met work with the provider to meet it. I wont get into technical issues those are covered under NDA's.