Standard or no standard, Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks are rushing to deliver 10G-bps Ethernet products, chasing pent-up demand they said is coming from multiple points on the network.
Cisco intends to deliver in the second half of the year proprietary products that will deliver Ethernet frames at 10G bps, even as it releases additional Gigabit Ethernet over Category 5 copper cabling options for its Catalyst 2900, 4000 and 6000 switches, according to officials at NetWorld+Interop.
Nortel, meanwhile, intends to deliver 10G-bps Ethernet support starting early next year with its Verselar 25000 core router, and it will have 10G-bps Ethernet support in its Accelar 8600 by mid-2001, according to Zinan Chen, a director at the Bay Architecture Lab for Nortel.
Already, users on both sides of the LAN/WAN divide are pushing the vendors for 10G-bps Ethernet, and it doesn't seem to matter that the first round of products will not be standards-based.
"If I have two terabit routers connected point-to-point, they aren't talking to anyone else," said Sten Nordell, chief technology officer at Utfors AD, a service provider in Stockholm, Sweden, that is building the world's largest Ethernet network across Scandinavia. "We'll demand they get to the standards when they come, but interoperability isn't a big issue, and there's no way we can wait until 2000-and-whatever."
Nevertheless, vendors are watching proposed standard technologies.
In the WAN arena, vendors and the IEEE 802.3 working group are looking at one proposal to use SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) OC-192 as the Layer 1 physical transport mechanism for 10G-bps Ethernet.
A user at one major data communications service provider, who asked not to be named, studied that option and said that Ethernet over SONET "would cost us and our customers [75 percent less] in equipment." The same user said the bandwidth can also be used more efficiently.
More significantly, the use of Ether net's active flow control in the wide areaÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢,Ã,¬"rather than today's practice of using data-loss-prone TCP/IP's flow controlÃÆ'Ã,¢Ã¢,Ã,¬"has the potential to eliminate jitter and increase efficiency in WANs, the user said.
The first draft proposal will come up for a vote in September, although it will take several iterations before the standard is considered stable. The final standard is not expected until 2002.
For aggregating multiple Gigabit Ethernet links in LANs, 10G-bps Ether net promises less expensive connections and fewer configuration head aches, said Mike Bennett, network engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "It'll be cheaper, simpler, and I already have one user community here clamoring for a 10-gigabit link," Bennett said.
That group, he said, has already maxed out its existing Gigabit Ethernet switch for its bandwidth-intensive applications. Bennett hopes to begin testing prototype equipment in the next month or so.
Beyond such high-end applications, driving the accelerated pace of development are the fast-growing server farms at hosting sites and data centers, especially as Gigabit-Ethernet-over-copper adapters become more widely available.
"As 1000BaseT proliferates in server farms, it will drive the requirements for 10-gigabit in the backbone," said Walt Blomquist, Catalyst switching product line manager at Cisco.
Upgrading the proprietary equipment to the standard, once it is completed, will not be an expensive move for customers, said Bruce Tolley, product manager at Cisco and a vice president in the 10 Gigabit Ether net Alliance, which is promoting the stan dardisation effort.
"It might only mean pulling out one transceiver module and plugging in another," Tolley said. The Cisco-specific pieces will be the optical interface, but Tolley and others agreed that the standard will keep Ethernet's framing intact.
"Cisco will be the only one out there initially with a 10-gigabit [Ethernet media access control layer]," he added.
Cisco will support 10G-bps Ethernet on a single module that will accommodate different transceivers that will connect to single- and multimode fibre over short-, medium- and long-reach fibre runs.
The 802.3 working group hopes to define specifications for 100 meters and 300 meters on multimode fibre as well as 2, 10 and 40 kilometers over single-mode fibre.
