News

posted on 17 June 2008 07:11

An Ethernet standards sub-committee has been formed to help the development of loss-less and predictable latency data center-class Ethernet.

It has been formed by the Ethernet Alliance, a consortium of system and component vendors, industry experts, and university and government professionals committed to promoting industry awareness, acceptance, and advancement of technology and products based on both existing and emerging IEEE 802 Ethernet standards and their management.

There are two large data center networking vendors proposing that Ethernet will become the overall data center networking fabric, being used for server to workstation networking, server to server networking, including clustering and storage networking. These are Cisco, the promotor of the Ethernet economics idea, and Brocade with its Data Center Fabric (DCF) concept and Data Center Switch (DCX) product.

Ethernet as a carrying network can lose packets of data and does not have a predictable latency unlike, say, Fibre Channel. Although there is a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE) protocol we are unlikely to see pervasive use of this until the underlying Ethernet fabric is as reliable as Fibre Channel in terms of not losing packets, meaning loss-less, and predictable delivery time.

This new form of Ethernet has been described as data center-class Ethernet and the job of the sub-committee is to encourage its development.

Yesterday Voltaire announced it was building a 40Gbit/s InfiniBandswitching platform for high performance computing and enterprise data centers. InfiniBand has the speed, reliability and predictability needed to be a converged fabric backbone and the Ethernet engineers need to get their act together to fulfil the destiny they see coming of an all-conquering Ethernet everywhere.

The new data center subcommittee will work with the IEEE 802 task force to promote emerging standards for data center networking, such as IEEE 802.1 Data Center Bridging and Congestion Notification, the ANSI T11 FC-BB-5 for Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and others. We can expect white papers and interoperability tests.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}