10Gb Ethernet Alliance is Formed

Lucas123 writes "Nine storage and networking vendors have created a consortium to promote the use of 10GbE. The group views it as the future of a combined LAN/SAN infrastructure. They highlight the spec's ability to pool and virtualize server I/O, storage and network resources and to manage them together to reduce complexity. By combining block and file storage on one network, they say, you can cut costs by 50% and simplify IT administration. 'Compared to 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel, a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet-based storage infrastructure can cut storage network costs by 30% to 75% and increases bandwidth by 2.5 times.'"

Math on /.

[Idiomatick (976696)]

i'm worried they had to say 4 * 2.5 = 10 on /.

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[Shakrai (717556)]

It can only get 80% saturation

Do you have a citation for that? I've seen Ethernet networks with decent switches approach 95% of the rated capacity.

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[rdebath (884132)]

Modern ethernet 100Base-T switched or 1000Base-T can work to 100%. With the switched medium all the links run full duplex and packets for busy links are stored in memory like a router. With a good switch packets for non-busy links get 'wormholed' to the output before they arrive (arrive completely that is).

Normally this means that modern lans won't lose any packets; if your lan is losing packets you have a hardware problem. Perhaps you have an unswitched hub somewhere or a seriously overloaded switch tha

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[gallwapa (909389)]

CSMA/CD still applies, except for the fact that on a switched architecture your collision domain is only a single port on the switch. Therefore the problem will lie between the switch and the device itself.

CSMA/CD is still important in modern ethernet networks, due to the fact that some devices do not properly auto-negotiate. Some devices doesn't obey the RFC's for interpacket spacing in an effort to improve their throughput that can wreak havoc on networks.

In many cases, if a link fails auto negotiation

Re:Math on /.

[petermgreen (876956)]

BTW 10 gigabit ethernet has completely dropped support for half duplex links.

Fibre only?

[masonc (125950)]

From their white paper,
"The draft standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet is significantly different in some respects from earlier Ethernet standards, primarily
in that it will only function over optical fiber, and only operate in full-duplex mode"

There are vendors, such as Tyco Electronic's AMP NetConnect line, that have 10G over copper. Has this been discarded in the standard revision?

Re:Fibre only?

[sjhwilkes (202568)]

Not to mention 10 gig CX4 - which uses the same copper cables as Infiniband, and works for up to 15M - enough for many situations. I've used it extensively for server to top of rack switch, then fiber from the top of rack switch to a central pair of switches. 15M is enough for interlinking racks too provided the environment's not huge.

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[gmack (197796)]

If that's true I'm going to be a tad pissed. I payed extra when I wired my apartment so I could be future proof with cat6 instead of the usual cat5e.

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[mrmagos (783752)]

Don't worry, according to the task force for 10GBASE-T (IEEE 802.3an), cat6 can support 10Gbit up to 55m. The proposed cat6a will support it out to the usual 300m.

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[Klaus_1250 (987230)]

Future proof would have been cat7.

Re:Fibre only?

[Belial6 (794905)]

Unfortunately, you made a fundamental, but common mistake. You cannot future proof your home by running any kind of cable. You should have run conduit. That is the only way to future proof a home for data. When I renovated my last home, I ran conduit to every room. It was pretty cool in that I didn't run any data cables at all until the house was finished. When The house was done, I just pulled the phone, coax and Ethernet lines to the rooms I wanted. If and when fiber, or a higher quality copper is needed, it i will just be a matter of taping the new cable to the end of the old, and pulling it through.

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[afidel (530433)]

62.5nm fiber is pretty damn future proof. Considering they run terabits per second over it today I don't think any home network is going to outgrow it during my lifetime =)

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[segfaultcoredump (226031)]

I guess that is why we run 50/125 multimode everywhere. the 62.5 just didnt cut it anymore for higher bandwidth applications :-)

Maybe you are thinking about 9micron singlemode fiber?

Re:Fibre only?

[Pinback (80041)]

In your case, you really do get to the internet via tubes.

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[darkpixel2k (623900)]

Unfortunately, you made a fundamental, but common mistake. You cannot future proof your home by running any kind of cable. You should have run conduit. That is the only way to future proof a home for data. When I renovated my last home, I ran conduit to every room. It was pretty cool in that I didn't run any data cables at all until the house was finished. When The house was done, I just pulled the phone, coax and Ethernet lines to the rooms I wanted. If and when fiber, or a higher quality copper is needed,

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[JLester (9518)]

You can: place a string in the conduit as you glue them together, use a fish tape (thin, stiff metal or fiberglass wrapped on a reel) to push through the conduit to the opposite end, use a vacuum with a small spongy ball slightly smaller than the conduit, etc.

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[jimicus (737525)]

Conduits join at junctions, and when you put the conduits in you run a piece of string with a weight on it through them. Use the string to draw the cable to the first junction box, tie the cable to another string going in another direction off the box and pull again. Lather rinse and repeat until complete.

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[oolon (43347)]

Yes you have wasted your money unfortunately cat 6 only supports 2.5 Gbs, and unfortunately no one produced equipement to work at that speed because the wiring people came up with the standard before asking if anyone wanted to produce equipement to work over it, cat5e is certified for 1Gbs use. The newer standards like 10Gbs ethernet has been designed with buy in from equipement manufacters, copper 10 or cat 6e was probably what you need. However as 10Gbs (copper) ethernet currently uses 45 watts a port...

Misleading Title.

[by Anonymous Coward]

The 10GEA [wikipedia.org] is not the same as the storage alliance mentioned in TFA.

Block storage?

[mosel-saar-ruwer (732341)]

By combining block and file storage on one network, they say, you can cut costs by 50% and simplify IT administration.

What is "block" storage?

Re:Block storage?

[spun (1352)]

SAN is block storage, NAS is file storage. Simply put, if you send packets requesting blocks of data, like you would send over your local bus to your local hard drive, it is block storage. If you send packets requesting whole files, it is file storage.

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[Guy Harris (3803)]

SAN is block storage, NAS is file storage. Simply put, if you send packets requesting blocks of data, like you would send over your local bus to your local hard drive, it is block storage. If you send packets requesting whole files, it is file storage.

No. If you send packets requesting blocks of data on a region of disk space, without any indication of a file to which they belong, that's block storage. If you send packets opening (or otherwise getting a handle for) a file, packets to read particular regi

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[spun (1352)]

Thanks for clarifying that. But I've never heard anyone refer to random access on a given file as 'block' storage.

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[QuantumRiff (120817)]

The previous reply was good, just wanted to expand. File access is literally grabbing a file over the network. Like opening a word document. It pulls the entire file over the network, then opens it.

Your hard drive is a block device. A SAN just uses some protocols to make the OS treat a remote storage as a local disk (Think of it as scsi going over the network, instead of a local cable, which is almost exactly what iSCSI is). You can format, defrag, etc. The OS does not know that the device isn't insid

SCI, Infiniband

[Colin Smith (2679)]

etc.

I can do this already. Up to 90 odd Gbit.

Ethernet will have to be cheap.

 

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[afidel (530433)]

There are literally several orders of magnitude more ports of ethernet sold per year than fiberchannel and there are about an order of magnitude more fiberchannel than infiniband. Most of the speakers at storage networking world last week think that it's inevitable that ethernet will take over storage, the ability to spread R&D out over that many ports is just too great of an advantage for it not to win in the long run.

bandwidth = performance ?

[magarity (164372)]

So how will tcpip networking over this speed measure up to dedicated storage devices like SAN over fibre channel? I have to suspect not; existing iSCSI over 1GB tcpip is a lot less than 1/4 of 4GB fibre to a decent SAN. Sigh, I'm afraid even more of my databases will get hooked up to cheap iSCSI over this instead of SANs space that costs more dollars per capacity but delivers the speed when needed :( Reports coming up fast enough? Remember the planning phase when the iSCSI sales rep promised better performance per $ than SAN? It wasn't better overall performance, just better per $. There's a BIG difference.

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[RingDev (879105)]

If the practical bandwidth differences between bleeding edge SCSI and bleeding edge Ethernet over fiber between the physical storage of your data, the controller of the database, and the requester of the data, is the limiting factor of your "reports coming up", there is either a fundamental design issue going on, or your clients are sitting at the terminals with stop watches counting the milliseconds of difference.

-Rick

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[Znork (31774)]

existing iSCSI over 1GB tcpip is a lot less than 1/4 of 4GB

I'd have to wonder what kind of config you're running then. I've gotten 90MB per second over $15 RTL8169 cards and a $70 D-Link gigabit switch. Between consumer grade pc's running ietd on linux to a linux iscsi initiator. I have no doubt that 10GB ethernet will wipe the floor with FC.

Remember the planning phase when the iSCSI sales rep promised better performance per $ than SAN?

Remember the planning phase when the SAN vendor promised cheaper storage

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[oolon (43347)]

It also means when the networking team does a bad firewall change, not only will prevent user access it will mess up the storage, requiring alot more work to get your databases up and filesystems running again or atleast a forced shutdown and reboot. Personally I would not want to share block storage on my public interface in any case, as iscsi is not designed as a highly secure standard, as this would impact performance, public interfaces generally has more sufficiated firewalling rules on the switch gear

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[QuantumRiff (120817)]

It is usually recommended to run a seperate network for the storage network. It is possible to run storage over the same nic that the server uses for other network traffic, but is not recommened (but is used often as a "failover"). This also helps when you turn on Jumbo Frames, some servers just don't like to work correctly. Seperate network makes it better.

However, the best advantage of iSCSI over FC is replication. How much extra infrastructure and technologies do you need to replicate to a site 1000

Bonding for Unlimited Bandwidth

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

If these new fast ethernet specs came with specs for plugging multiple parallel paths between machines all under the same host IP#s, so we just add extra HW ports and cables between them to multiply our bandwidth, ethernet would take over from most other interconnect protocols.

Is there even a way to do this now with 1Gb-e, or even 100Mbps-e? So all I have to do is add daughtercards to an ethernet card, or multiple cards to a host bus, and let the kernel do the rest, with minimal extra latency?

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[Feyr (449684)]

yes, look up "etherchannel" or "bonding"

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[Phishcast (673016)]

Kind of. This method of aggregating bandwidth by using multiple links does poor man's load balancing. The traffic between one source and one target will only traverse a single path until that path fails. If you have a lot of different sources on one side of an etherchannel going to a lot of different targets on the other side of the etherchannel, you get a relatively balanced workload. If you've got a smaller number of sources and targets it's easy to get uneven bandwidth utilization across those links.

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[Em Ellel (523581)]

yes, look up "etherchannel" or "bonding"

Wow, that takes me back years. A little over 10 years ago, straight out of college and not knowing any better I purchased the "cisco etherchannel interconnect" kit for their catalyst switches. I had to work hard to track down a cisco reseller that actually had it (which should have been a clue). When I finally got it, the entire "kit" contents were, I kid you not, two cross connect cat5 cables. I learned an important lesson about marketing that day.

-Em

P.S. In all fairness to Cisco the cost of the kit was a

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[imbaczek (690596)]

802.3ad [wikipedia.org]

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[Doc Ruby (173196)]

It looks like that's even supported in the Linux kernel [linux-ip.net]. But does it really work?

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[Doc Ruby (173196)]

No, it looks like what I asked about is standardized as IEEE 802.3ad [slashdot.org], and even implemented in the Linux kernel. But does it actually work?

Cost?

[segfaultcoredump (226031)]

Hope they fix the pricing issue, because I the FC network I just put in cost less per Gb than a 1 gig-E network. When compared to the cost per Gb of a 10G-E netowrk, the entire thing cost less than the optics on the 10G stuff, let alone the actual switch costs.

I'm also noticing that most if not all of my systems never even tap the bandwidth available on a pair of 4Gb FC ports, let alone 10Gb. I'm sure there are folks out there who need it, but it aint us.

Of course, our corporate standard is Cisco, so I'm su

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[Phishcast (673016)]

Didn't you buy Cisco Fibre Channel gear then? I don't recall their FC gear being inexpensive either!

The 10Gb ports aren't really about the hosts (today anyhow). They're generally more useful for the connections to large storage arrays which can push that kind of bandwidth, you'd be able to fan in more hosts to each storage array port.

Channel bonding

[h.ross.perot (1050420)]

Sigh, Aggregating 2 or more 1 GIG adapters does not give you 2 GIG of throughput. It is a sliding scale; the more you add the less total bandwidth you see. The safest bonding scheme uses LACP; Link Aggregation Control Protocol. This protocol communicates member state and load balancing request to the link member. 10G over copper will be a good thing for VM's. Sad; that the current crop of 10G over copper adapters do not approach 5 gig throughput; raw. Give the industry time; this it just like the introduction of 1 GIG from fast Ethernet. It took 2 generations of ASICs to get to what we consider a GIG card today.

look forward to the new standard

[v1 (525388)]

in other news, ISO starts the process of ratifying the new MS10G(tm) specifications.

Further blurring the distinction

[FranTaylor (164577)]

Between the network cable and the drive cable. USB subsumed many old-technology interconnects, perhaps 10 Gb Ethernet can replace SATA and continue the trend of decreasing the number of interfaces required on a computer.

Will there ever be "enough" bandwidth to a home?

[Dr. Spork (142693)]

Stories like this always make me think of the following:

I can't think of anyone who's longing to get a fatter gas pipe connected to their house, or a fatter pipe to municipal water, or a cable of higher capacity to bring in more electricity.

But we're not like that with bandwidth. We always seem to want a fatter pipe of bandwidth! Will it forever be like that? Is the household bandwidth consumption ever going to plateau, like electric, gas and water consumption has in the US? (I know that global demand for these utilities is growing, but that's mainly because there are more people and a larger proportion are being hooked up to municipal utilities. The per-household numbers are not really changing very much, and in some cases decreasing.)

Will there be a plateau in bandwidth demand? If so, when and at what level? Thoughts?

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[Em Ellel (523581)]

Networking is getting faster in leaps and bound, yet hard drives are still uber slow.

Yeah, but they are getting larger and cheaper. You can have drives in parallel (RAID) which will increase your throughput significantly. If you have $$ to spend on 10Gig link, you are unlikely to be hooking up a single drive.

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[cshake (736412)]

That seems to be the idea behind this spec - a network interface that is as fast as a drive interface on a local machine, which would allow for nearly transparent remote drives, or even striped and mirrored raid across multiple machines to make it really fast. It really would be nice to see that.

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[jimicus (737525)]

By the time you account for seek time and latency, we've practically got that already with gigabit ethernet unless you're already running a reasonable RAID.

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[moderatorrater (1095745)]

You're not using your home network like you should be then. I often find myself transferring multiple gigabytes of information from one computer to another.

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[calebt3 (1098475)]

Why not?

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[mrsteveman1 (1010381)]

BECAUSE silly, you are supposed to be using quantum drives by now. Flip a bit on drive 1 in room A, and drive 2 in room B flips the same way.

Sheesh