Hello All,
There are two areas of technology where I see a huge shift coming. One of them was brought to my attention at the Telecosm conference, and I have begun to verify and witness it's coming. The other is one that I brought up at the Telecosm conference, and I do not believe that the cellular providers (and/or George) see it coming yet. ;-)
1. Ethernet, and specifically 10Gbps Ethernet.
At the Telecosm conference, there was considerable discussion about the emergence of OC-192 (10Gbps pipes) as the "standard pipe size" that is emerging in todays new infrastructure. There was talk about what framing and protocols would be running over these pipes, and the one prediction that was proposed, by several vendors and providers, is that it would not be ATM or SONET, but instead would be Ethernet ... 10Gbps Ethernet. ;-)
Upon returning from the conference, and then attending the NetWorld+Interop Networking show in Atlanta, Ga. I talked with several vendors and suppliers who are well on their way to making this a reality. 1Gbps Ethernet is beginning to show up everywhere, with a wide range of supporting vendors. All of these vendors seem to think that 10Gbps is less than a year away, although the standards finalization is still not complete. As usual, it is being pushed hard by the vendors who want to beat each other to market.
What this could mean is that companies that are wiring themselves with 10Mbps, 100Mbps, and 1Gbps Ethernet internally now, could simply connect into a Ethernet switch which would support 10Gbps ... and go directly to the ISPs data center at 10Gbps over fiber. This is being done *today* at 1Gbps by companies like Yipes (http://www.yipes.com) ... they fully intend to upgrade to 10Gbps as the hardware becomes available. Companies like Extreme Networks (http://www.extremenetworks.com) are also betting on this future. So the Internet could become Ethernet "end-to-end" ...
What is truly amazing about this is that the disk and Storage Area Network (SAN) markets are about to be rocked by this also. I found the first company in this space that I am truly impressed with. 3ware (http://www.3ware.com) is a company who is revolutionizing the storage space by using 1Gbps Ethernet to connect computers to high-capacity storage arrays. They are using inexpensive IDE/ATA disk drives, and eliminating all of the expensive SCSI and Fiber Channel gear. They too will be moving to 10Gbps Ethernet as it becomes available. They are already making records with the performance (and cost/performance) of their hardware. They are also going to benefit from the commoditization of the 1 Gbps and 10Gbps hardware as the volumes pick up.
The last issue related to all of this is the I/O bus architectures of today's computers. The current PCI standard for computer peripheral adapters is the serious bottleneck in performance. In most cases, it limits the communications to 600Mbps ... restricting the ability for true utilization of even 1Gbps Ethernet. So in the short term, 10Gbps Ethernet becomes a way to aggregate traffic from numerous computers onto a single high-capacity link.
To rectify this, new bus architectures are being developed such as Infiniband. Intel is working on this, along with several other vendors (http://intel.com/design/servers/future_server_io/) but it seems a little ways off. In talking with a friend this weekend we were debating if Sun is the only vendor who can provide hardware that exceeds the current limitations since they are using their own "proprietary" hardware and don't have many of the same Intel "limitations" ...
Oh well ... just some thoughts, and a request for feedback and suggestions on other companies that might be worth looking at in this space.
I'll talk about my other area of interest in my next post ...
Scott C. Lemon |
