The Road To Terabit Ethernet 210
stinkymountain writes "Pre-standard 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet products — server network interface cards, switch uplinks and switches — are expected to hit the market later this year. Standards-compliant products are expected to ship in the second half of next year, not long after the expected June 2010 ratification of the 802.3ba standard. Despite the global economic slowdown, global revenue for 10G fixed Ethernet switches doubled in 2008, according to Infonetics. There is pent-up demand for 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, says John D'Ambrosia, chair of the 802.3ba task force in the IEEE and a senior research scientist at Force10 Networks. 'There are a number of people already who are using link aggregation to try and create pipes of that capacity,' he says. 'It's not the cleanest way to do things...(but) people already need that capacity.' D'Ambrosia says even though 40/100G Ethernet products haven't arrived yet, he's already thinking ahead to terabit Ethernet standards and products by 2015. 'We are going to see a call for a higher speed much sooner than we saw the call for this generation' of 10/40/100G Ethernet, he says."
Re:Physics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anyone know what are the physical limitations of highspeed ethernet? I mean at some point doesn't it become impossible to move electrons or modulate data any faster?
The speed of light limitation will limit ping times over a set distance. Upgrading to terabit speed doesn't make the end nodes further apart, it widens the pipe between them. So, no, I don't see a theoretical limit to how wide the pipe can be. At some point, you'd need a really thick cable, I suppose, which could become impractical.
There's other bottlenecks, too, such as the speed of the systems' internal busses, or storage devices, though.
Gee, that's great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ethernet or Token Ring (Score:3, Insightful)
While we have retained the ethernet name and frame format CSMA/CD has pretty much gone the way of the dodo (it's supported but virtually never used at gigabit and not supported at all at 10 gigabit)
Token ring gives each device on the ring roughly equal time, I'd imagine switched ethernet with a decent switch would have similar behaviour. I beleive some of them can also prioritise data.
they yell for a bigger integer before "bit" instead of changing technology.
because throwing bandwidth at the problem typically solves it without needing to redesign the network or make value judgements about whose data is more important.
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
Infiniband: a better technology in the datacenter (Score:1, Insightful)
Infiniband is faster than Ethernet today and can scale better with lower latency. It is also significantly cheaper and can be used for SANs and LANs to eliminate bulky cables.
The desktop will only need Gigabit, arguably 100Mb/s for next 5 or 10 years. It is the servers and network trunks that need the speed not the desktops.
Re:Physics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends what you mean with speed. The lowest possibel latency is limited by teh speed of light.
Bandwidth is limited by the number of "tubes" you can run and how much data you can push down each tube. In principle there's nothing stopping you from doing something crazy like encoding your data on DNA strands that you dissolve in a soup and push down an actual tube with cross section 10m, moving thousands of liters of DNA soup per second. The theoretical maximum bandwidth of such a setup would be staggering, but the latency would be horrid.
So basically latency is limited by the speed of light while the theoretical limit to bandwidth is so massive that other practical and economic concerns will limit it rather than fundamental physics.
Re:Physics? (Score:3, Insightful)
In theory it is possible to create a system that transmits informations faster than the speed of light.... It is however obviously impossible to make those perfect materials, thus we're bound to sub-c communications.
I don't think it's accurate to says that FTL communication is possible, even in theory, if the materials the theory would require are themselves impossible.
Re:Please make IEEE-1588 a standard part of 1TbE (Score:1, Insightful)
He didn't say, "Please make a specification for this", he said, "Please take the time to add support for this to your hardware." It doesn't matter if the specification exists or not if nobody takes the time to add it to their implementation.
Re:Ethernet or Token Ring (Score:3, Insightful)
You're a moron or in love with token ring.
I don't think those two are exclusive of each other.