from the what-is-that-in-LOCs-per-second? dept.
Rebranded Ethernet Technology Consortium Unveils 800 Gigabit Ethernet
With an increasing demand for networking speed and throughput performance within the datacenter and high performance computing clusters, the newly rebranded Ethernet Technology Consortium has announced a new 800 Gigabit Ethernet technology. Based upon many of the existing technologies that power contemporary 400 Gigabit Ethernet, the 800GBASE-R standard is looking to double performance once again, to feed ever-hungrier datacenters.
The recently-finalized standard comes from the Ethernet Technology Consortium, the non-IEEE, tech industry-backed consortium formerly known as the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium. The group was originally created to develop 25, 50, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet technology, and while IEEE Ethernet standards have since surpassed what the consortium achieved, the consortium has stayed formed to push even faster networking speeds, and changing its name to keep with the times. Some of the biggest contributors and supporters of the ETC include Broadcom, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft, with more than 40 companies listed as integrators of its work.
[...] All told, the 800GbE standard is the latest step for an industry as a whole that is moving to Terabit (and beyond) Ethernet. And while those future standards will ultimately require faster [Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes)] to drive the required individual lane speeds, for now 800GBASE-R can deliver 800GbE on current generation hardware. All of which should be a boon for the standard's intended hyperscaler and HPC operator customers, who are eager to get more bandwidth between systems.
Related: As 100 Gbps Ethernet Picks Up, Google Ponders 5 Petabits Per Second
Ethernet Switch Sales Flat, But 40 Gbps Sales Take Off
Here Comes 5Gbps Networking Over Standard Cables
Aquantia Launches 2.5/5/10G Ethernet Chips for Consumers
25G/50G Ethernet Specification Finalized
Related Stories
The Platform reports that Google's networking ambitions have scaled up along with their datacenters:
The gap between what a hyperscaler can build and what it might need seems to be increasing, and perhaps at a ridiculous pace. When the networking industry was first delivering 40 Gb/sec Ethernet several years back, search engine giant Google was explaining that it would very much like to have 1 Tb/sec switching. And as we enter the epoch of 100 Gb/sec networking and contemplate perhaps delivering 1 Tb/sec Ethernet gear maybe in 2020 or so, Google has once again come forward and explained that what will be really needed soon is something closer to 5 Pb/sec networking.
You heard that right. In a recent presentation where Amin Vahdat, a Google Fellow and technical lead for networking, gave some details on ten years' worth of homemade networking inside of the company, he said "petabits per second." This, in a 2015 world where getting a switch to do something north of 6 terabits per second out of a single switch ASIC is an accomplishment. Forget for a second that the Ethernet industry has no idea whatsoever about how it might increase the switching bandwidth by close to three orders of magnitude. The math that Vahdat walked through is as fascinating as it is fun.
[...] To illustrate the issues facing datacenter and system designers in the future, Vahdat brought up another of Amdahl's Laws, the one that says you should have 1 Mbit/sec of I/O for every 1 MHz of computation to maintain a balanced system in a parallel computing environment. And pointed out that with the adoption of flash today and other non-volatile memories in the future, which have very high bandwidth and very low latency requirements, keeping the network in balance with compute and storage is going to be a big challenge. [...] For 50,000 servers running at [2.5 GHz - see here], Amdahl's lesser law suggests, according to Vahdat, that we need a 5 Pb/sec network. And even with a 10:1 oversubscription rate on the network, you are still talking about needing a 500 Tb/sec network.
To put that into perspective, Vahdat estimates that the backbone of the Internet has around 200 Tb/sec of bandwidth. And bandwidth is not the only issue. If you want that NVM memory to be useful, then this future hyper-bandwidth network has to provide 10 microsecond latencies between the servers and the storage, and even for flash-based storage, you need 100 microsecond latencies to make the storage look local (more or less) to the servers. Otherwise, the servers, which are quite expensive, will be sitting there idle a lot of the time, waiting for data.
Original Submission
Sales of Ethernet switches remain flat, but the market for 40 gigabit per second switches is increasing:
The total Q3 Ethernet switch market revenue was $6.1 billion, just two per cent higher than for the same quarter in 2014, and the enterprise share slipped from Q2 to Q3 by 7.2 per cent.
North America was the best place to be selling switches in 2015, with IDC saying is rose 8.2 per cent year-on-year. The Asia-Pac rose 3.9 per cent, China by 3.6 per cent, and Western Europe was nearly flat at 0.8 per cent.
[...] A bright spot for vendors is that customers seem to be drinking the 40 Gbps kool-aid. While 10 Gbps port shipments rose by 27.4 per cent, prices are falling, so the segment value dipped by 1.6 per cent. The 40 Gbps segment, on the other hand, rose 41.4 per cent year-on-year to a value of $644 million.
More info about 25 Gigabit Ethernet (and 50), and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (and 40).
There's fast and then there's fast! I found this story at Ars Technica which is reporting that the IEEE has approved the 802.3bz standard: 2.5Gbps over Cat 5e, 5Gbps over Cat 6:
A new Ethernet standard that allows for up to 2.5Gbps over normal Cat 5e cables (the ones you probably have in your house) has been approved by the IEEE. The standard—formally known as IEEE 802.3bz-2016, 2.5G/5GBASE-T, or just 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet—also allows for up to 5Gbps over Cat 6 cabling.
The new standard was specifically designed to bridge the copper-twisted-pair gap between Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbps), which is currently the fastest standard for conventional Cat 5e and Cat 6 cabling, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, which can do 10Gbps but requires special Cat 6a or 7 cabling. Rather impressively work only began on the new standard at the end of 2014, which gives you some idea of how quickly the powers that be wanted to push this through.
[...] The new 2.5G/5GBASE-T standard (PDF) will let you run 2.5Gbps over 100 metres of Cat 5e or 5Gbps over 100 metres of Cat 6, which should be fine for most homes and offices. The standard also implements other nice-to-have features, including various Power over Ethernet standards (PoE, PoE+, and UPoE)—handy for rolling out Wi-Fi access points.
The physical (PHY) layer of 2.5G/5GBASE-T is very similar to 10GBASE-T, but instead of 400MHz of spectral bandwidth it uses either 200MHz or 100MHz, thus not requiring a super-high-quality mega-shielded cable. ... Other differences from 10GBASE-T include low density parity checking (LDPC) rather than CRC-8 error correction, and PAM-16 modulation rather than DSQ128.>
These last acronyms are all designed to deal with errors in data transmission. low density parity checking, CRC, Pulse amplitude modulation, and DSQ128 is a 128-bit implementation of Double Square QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation).
As this standard was just approved it will still be a while before commercial products are available, let alone for them to become affordable for regular consumers. I'm curious if there are any Soylentils who are already maxing out their gigabit networks, and if so, what are you doing to max it out? How much would this additional speed help?
At the time in 2015, the 2.5G/5G standards were not yet ratified by IEEE. There were chips in the market, solely from Aquantia, for enterprise configurations that were happy to go with an evolving standard for their solution. From September 2016 this changed, and the standards have been ratified with Aquantia, Intel, Cisco and others all involved in the specification. Aquantia's earlier generation silicon adhered to the standard, and has been deployed in a number of enterprise backbone deployments to the tune of 5M ports a year. Today's announcement surrounds the launch of two new controllers based on the multi-gigabit standards aimed at more consumer level solutions – specifically 'client connectivity in enterprise, gaming and SMB applications'.
[...] For now, the AQtion 2.5G/5G controllers coming to market look to be a premium component, destined for high-end notebooks/PCs, and if the pricing is right, more expansive than the current array of 10G integrated options. One of the issues Aquantia will have, which they also acknowledge, is the switch problem that currently stops 10G being more widespread – the lack of consumer grade and consumer budget level switches. We were told that there are some enterprise models of 2.5G/5G switches currently for more backbone type of work, and it will be up to Aquantia's partners to spot opportunities in the consumer market. From a personal perspective, the switch side of the equation will be the slowest to change and be a defining aspect for the widespread adoption of this technology. We've seen this with 10G, or the fact that the Killer gaming NICs do not have corresponding switches/routers to assist in a number of features that might become irrelevant in a general network. Publicly Aquantia isn't stating which switch developers they are working with, and as before, leaving those companies to decide/announce their product lines, but I think the switch aspect will be more important to watch over 2017.
On performance metrics, Aquantia have told us that the AQ107 can achieve 9.5 Gbps in each direction in the 10G mode with a CPU utilization of 12-20%, and in 5G mode it can do 4.6 Gbps in each direction with 6-14% CPU use. Due to the higher clock rate of the controller, in 1G mode the controller is quoted as having has[sic] lower latency than standard 1G controllers. The AQC107, in 5G mode, will have a typical power consumption around 3W when in use.
Does anybody here need this caliber of Ethernet at home?
The 25G Ethernet Consortium has released a 25G/50G Ethernet specification to the public:
There's already product a-plenty on the market, but it still matters that the Google-led 25G Ethernet consortium has formalised the release of its technical specification. It follows the publication of the final report from last August's 25G/50G Ethernet plugfest. The plugfest demonstrated an impressive 882 25G link configurations (843 of which passed the test), and 360 50G link configurations (341 passed).
[...] As well as the specification (published by the 25G Consortium, registration required), the group will publish a list of certified integrators. In its statement, the 25G Consortium says the plugfest also demonstrated backwards compatibility (for example with 10 Gbps Ethernet connections).
Also at FierceTelecom. Wikipedia link.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @08:03PM (5 children)
Imagine how quickly Zoom will be able to harvest all your personal information with that sort of data rate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @08:17PM (3 children)
Zoom? What about Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon..... TenCent, Huawei, other unknown spyware,, IoT spyware, the Russians, Iranians, Israelies....
But I am safe I tell you. WE had copper and they brought us fibre optic a couple of years back. 20x faster they said. I had faster connections over a 9600 baud modem 30 years ago. So exfiltrate away ye corporates and pirates, it will take you ten trillion years to download one photo.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday April 09 2020, @09:51PM (2 children)
I'm safe. I only use Google, Android, Chrome OS, Amazon and other safe applications that would never abuse my trust.
There, take that Microsoft, Apple and Zoom!
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You know how parking enforcement can put a boot on your car for unpaid parking tickets?
Well now you can do the same thing to your computer! With systemd-boot! It's more better than GRUB, well, because!
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday April 10 2020, @11:45AM (1 child)
Why the resentment? BTW, thanks for pointing it out, I didn't know it exists. If you are as paranoid as you seem to be, I suggest to first start systemd-rootkit (AKA Snapshot + Emulator), this allows you to roll back any malicious changes that might happen later.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 10 2020, @03:13PM
<no-sarcasm>
In all seriousness, I do write my own systemd unit files, for example, to start multiple independent Apache Tomcat instances as services. Sometimes different Tomcat instances might even run on different versions of Java, and different versions of Tomcat software depending upon what is needed. Distributions use systemd. It's just a fact of life. As long as it works, I don't have a problem with it. I also have to use Windows -- but I am not responsible for maintaining it.
</no-sarcasm>
Not only will the boot loader be absorbed into systemd, but the kernel and all distributions will as well! Just imagine! One install of systemd and you have all distributions available as part of that install! I don't just mean different desktop environments. I mean distributions, right down to their kernels, package management systems, etc. The unix philosophy. One giant tool that does everything. Sort of like Windows. And with the same kind of reliability and security.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @07:13PM
https://www.theonion.com/zoom-ceo-reclines-back-in-chair-in-front-of-massive-wal-1842781626 [theonion.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @08:31PM (1 child)
So we can get to our 'free' cap even faster and get charged for 'overage'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @09:47PM
It's not for people with only $1200 to spend.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday April 09 2020, @09:26PM (2 children)
On my pathetic, aging wired home network, I'm still using a mix of 1G and 10/100M stuff! Hey, that's faster than WiFi!
Big companies with lots of resources get to have entirely too much fun with the latest and greatest.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 09 2020, @10:30PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi#Versions [wikipedia.org]
Wi-Fi 5 and 6 can theoretically exceed 1 Gbps.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday April 12 2020, @05:28PM
When I moved into the house I still live in, the guy who owned it previously must have done something that involved a LOT of phones.
Phone jacks in every room. All leading to a set of punch down blocks in a closet in a bedroom in the basement. A space on the wood where some additional equipment had previously been.
In the 90's this was great! I could run 10baseT ethernet on it just fine. That then had both AppleTalk and TCP/IP. It was great. Everything was on this wired network. Even the series 2 TiVo (back in the day).
Eventually we added a bit of WiFi. Gradually we used more and more WiFi. Eventually we stopped using the wired network. That was kind of sad, since it had been so cool back in the day.
Also I lived in an area in the midwest that was one of the first places to get cable modem internet service. It was wonderful. Always on. Way faster than dial up. But it was early tech. Years later the cable system had to switch everyone to DOCSIS.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday April 09 2020, @09:48PM (1 child)
BYTE magazine, April 1980, page 115.
NEW HIGH-SPEED COMMUNICATIONS BUS: Xerox Corporation recently made a public announcement of a new concept of processor-to-processor communications intended for an office environment. This novel concept is called "Ethernet", and is a result of some of the work being done in their research labs. In this concept, a single coaxial cable is used as a high-speed communications bus between all processors; communication protocol is handled through software or software supplemented by special-purpose hardware. Rumor has it that an Ethernet processor is now being developed by some form of joint arrangement between Xerox and Intel.
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm [americanradiohistory.com]
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine [archive.org]
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday April 10 2020, @12:22AM
That original was 80000 times slower at 10 Mbit/s.
(Score: 2) by esperto123 on Friday April 10 2020, @01:08AM (6 children)
Its great that datacenters have such a fast bus speed, but when will we move beyond the 1 Gbps at home and offices? it is 20 years old and our devices and specially our storage drives have greatly exceeded what the current speeds can offer.
I have a home server with 60TB of drives (about 25TB of data stored in it), I dread the day I will upgrade the hardware and have to copy the data over to the new hardware, the pipes are becoming too small.
I know that there are 2.5G, 5G and even 10Gbps cards that a mortal like me can by, but anything over 2.5G is quite expensive and the switches are almost non-existent or professional class with a heavy price tag.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @01:56AM
https://store.ui.com/collections/routing-switching/products/unifi-switch-16-xg [ui.com]
practically free.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Friday April 10 2020, @02:58AM
Yeah, $70-$100 per port is pricey. Eventually you will hit the point where it becomes worth it so save money every day by not waiting on the network/storage limitations you're hitting with 1 gigabit.
I was hoping that the "promise" from Aquantia of $30 per port for 10GBASE-T would come true at some point this year, but everything is being slowed down by this coronavirus thing. Home/small businesses are being hit especially hard and I doubt networking is on the top of their concerns for most of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @12:25PM
By my math, transferring 25TB of data over 1Gbps networking would take less than 5 days. Unless you're planning to upgrade the hardware a couple of times a year, I would consider the upgrade cost of faster networking gear not a worthwhile investment.
Did I calculate incorrectly? On my home network, my router and switches advertised at 1Gbps actually top out at about 650 Mbps sustained throughput. I ran some sloppy benchmarks between machines with netcat. 650 Mbps transfers 1GB in 13 seconds. 25TB = 25,000 GB, 25,000 * 13 / (60 seconds in a minute) / (60 minutes in an hour) / 24 (hours in a day) = 3.76 days.
Another possibility that could be less expensive is bonded ethernet ports ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation [wikipedia.org] ). At my old employer we would do that. It might be cheaper to set up your machines that require the fastest throughput that way - as long as all of the switches and firewalls between support it, you could get 2Gbps or 3Gbps - maybe even with the hardware you already have.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday April 10 2020, @01:36PM
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 11 2020, @05:14PM
I am afraid the home and SOHO will always lag MORE than the current tech permits. Not only because of economy of scale but because YOUR CONTROL OVER YOUR DATA is a bad thing for the system.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:37PM
30-70 for the SFP+ modules for each port.
100-200 dollars per 10G ethernet card.
Expensive compared to what motherboards/cpus/memory costs right now, but not paritcularly expensive compared to expansion cards of the past, and quite effective if you want 10G networking.
For anyone who doesn't know CAT5/5E is good enough for like 20M 10G pulls, Cat6 for 30M pulls and Either 6E or 7 for 100M pulls. For practically anybody's use case the 5/6 cabling will be plenty high quality, and anyone running a 100M drop today should just invest the added money in fiber adapters and wiring and benefit from electric isolation between networks or nodes. Also lowers EMF broadcasting in case you're worried about someone snooping on your network traffic with passive wireless suveillance techniques.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @03:47PM
*sigh* i wish some genius would already invented the ethernet catX 5$ crimping tool but for fiber optics.
as it is now, the "tool" to fit a "head" to a 5$ per 1000 meter fiber optic cable is 300 dollars?
most people don't need to "bridge" physical locations further apart then 150 meters but imagine ... there SFPs for phiber that can go 20+ km.(*)
also copper is precious and it always makes me honour 10 seconds of silence when i throw away 1.5 mm of straight-cut ethernet cable copper into the garbage bin.
pluuuuuse? gimme fiber optic crimping toooooool... cheap!
(*) maybe we home users are denied the right "to span distances" and it's a conspiracy afterall ^_^