Construction Zones On The Ethernet Roadmap

By Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is never enough bandwidth in a datacenter that is the size of a football field and that is expected to work more or less like a single computer. While 10 Gb/sec Ethernet on the server and 40 Gb/sec Ethernet on the backbone is fine for many enterprises today, hyperscalers, cloud builders, and service providers are pushing up against these limits and crave more bandwidth.

Getting an entire industry to agree on standards and to produce products that must meet an increasingly diversifying set of needs is a challenge, and the Ethernet Alliance, an industry group that has been working with the IEEE and other standards bodies for the past decade to help shape the networking realm, has been putting out a roadmap each year to give us all a sense of where we are going. The latest roadmap was put out this week in conjunction with the Optical Fiber Communication conference, and it has a few tweaks compared to last year’s roadmap, which we walked through in detail last March.

Scott Kipp, who is director of engineering at Brocade, which makes Fibre Channel and Ethernet switches and who is also president of the Ethernet Alliance, gave us the rundown on what has changed in the past year on the roadmap. There is not a lot of change in the datacenter space, but there are some interesting things that will change the future of networking in the glass house as we approach what Kipp calls the Terabit Mountains off in the distance.

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Tags: 25G Ethernet

Category: News