The Long Cycles Of Enterprise Networks
We have been talking about the impending and now delivered 100 Gb/sec speeds for InfiniBand used by HPC centers and for Ethernet to be used by hyperscalers that it is hard to remember sometimes that the enterprise is a significant laggard when it comes to network bandwidth. For a lot of companies, 10 Gb/sec Ethernet was sufficient for a long time, and for some, it will continue to be for many years. But other enterprises are busting up against the bandwidth ceiling.
For them, the next logical move is either to embrace 40 Gb/sec Ethernet now or to wait until the market around the 25G Ethernet standard, fomented by the hyperscalers, develops and products are available starting later this year.
It is a tough call, and many think that only the hyperscalers will want the 25G products. We happen to think otherwise, provided that the pricing and packaging of the 25G products is right. What datacenter, building cloudy infrastructure, would not rather have 25 Gb/sec ports into the servers and up to the switch and either 50 Gb/sec or 100 Gb/sec uplinks to the network core from the top of rack switch? The hyperscalers argued – we think intelligently – that 40 Gb/sec and 100 Gb/sec technologies based on 10 GHz lanes were too hot and expensive compared to those using 25 GHz lanes as embodied in the 25G standard they compelled the IEEE to adopt after it initially rejected it for 100 Gb/sec Ethernet based on 10 GHz lanes.
Read the full article at The Next Platform
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