Om Malik has written a post “Ethernet zooms to 100 Gigabit speeds“, and it’s annoyed me.
Om is apparently a pretty nice guy, and I’ve really got nothing against him personally - for all I know, he was probably tired and half asleep when he wrote this post.
So, Om, if you read this - don’t take it too hard, it’s just me ranting, ok? Put it down to a crazy aussie.
“How fast can data travel over Ethernet? If you answered 10 Gigabit per second, then you would be off by about 90 gigabits per second.”
This statement has several problems with it:
The product Infinera demonstrated isn’t Ethernet. It’s ten 10Gbit ethernet (presumably) bonded links.
Secondly, making up your own propriatary bonding protocol that happens to use Ethernet, doesn’t make it Ethernet.
(I’ll leave the “about”, and “per second” alone - they just annoyed me more.)
Ethernet is an IEEE standard - All of which fall under IEEE 802.3. From what I can tell, Infinera arn’t even implementing a draft of an IEEE 100Gbit Ethernet protocol. Heck, the IEEE only met last month to discuss goals for 100Gbit ethernet.
This would mean that Infinera’s product is probably proprietary, and won’t be compatible with other vendor’s products*. So, if your company invests heavily in switching to 100Gbit Ethernet in their datacentre/peering centre/whatever, you’re stuck with them unless you’re prepared to switch the entire network over at once.
- end of rant -
I’m tired and half asleep, so I’m off to bed. G’night.
* = That is, unless the other vendor implements Infinera’s protocol exactly. Given the volume of data flowing through these connections, probably a lot of the hardware would need to be identical too.
