Ethernet vendors are ratcheting up the
speed limitation of this technology once again. Is a 10-Gigabit
Ethernet WAN in your network future, or is it just a pipe
dream?
By Susan Breidenbach
Network World, 09/11/00
The first 10-Gigabit Ethernet products are scheduled for release before year-end, and vendors say customers are lining up - despite the fact that the technology hasn't been standardized yet. Don't think you're not moving fast enough if you're not among the anxiously awaiting. The customers are largely service providers that want to deploy the equipment in WANs and metropolitan-area networks (MAN).
Click here for a look at the projected growth of the 10G Ethernet market.
Click here for a look at how 10G has evolved and where it's going.
Early demand for 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches is a testament to the power of simplicity, interoperability and a well-oiled standards process. "The vendors have really learned how to play in the same sandbox," says Eric Thompson, senior analyst at Dataquest in Raleigh, N.C. Dataquest expects Ethernet vendors to sell between 5,000 and 10,000 ports of 10-Gigabit Ethernet gear - about $33.7 million worth - before year-end, and predicts sales will zoom to $3.6 billion by 2004.
This latest flavor isn't carrier-sense multiple access with collision detection anymore, but it's still Ethernet on the surface, says Biprin Mystry, a technical marketing manager at 3Com, in Santa Clara. "You plug in a link and away it goes. This is why Ethernet always wins: It's a lot simpler than competitive technologies."
This time, though, the competitors are WAN technologies. The 10-Gigabit Ethernet standard supports distances of up to 40 kilometers on single-mode fiber, and it defines a 10-Gigabit Ethernet LAN physical interface (PHY) and a 9.584640-Gigabit PHY for connecting to an OC-192 WAN cloud.
For now, 10-Gigabit Ethernet is more for service providers than enterprises, says Patrick Paczkowski, an analyst for Current Analysis, in Sterling, Va. "They'll be able to map services on a wavelength and then provision them down to the enterprise and do end-to-end service-level agreements."
Gigabit Ethernet start-up vendor World Wide Packets (WWP) sees 10-Gigabit Ethernet enabling its gateway strategy, in which service providers will use multiplexing rather than routing to push gigabit services to the edge. "Getting rid of complex routing pushes costs down and delivers gigabit performance to Internet subscribers for less than they are paying for 100M bit/sec," says Bernard Daines, founder and CEO of WWP in Spokane, Wash.
"Telecommuting, telemedicine and tele-education all become real when you have these kinds of data rates," says Daines, who pioneered high-speed Ethernet by founding the first 100-Megabit Ethernet vendor, Grand Junction Networks (acquired by Cisco), and Gigabit Ethernet vendor Packet Engines (acquired by Alcatel).
By extending Ethernet to the WAN, you get one common technology running seamlessly across private and public networks. There is no need for a Layer 3 switch that reformats LAN packets and translates addresses for a different WAN environment.
That's a huge plus for Ethernet. "People tend to underestimate the complexity of networking across different formats," Paczkowski says. Also, Ethernet vendors demonstrate unparalleled adherence to standards, so multivendor interoperability is ensured.
The only (affordable) option
Naturally, members of the 10-Gigabit Ethernet Alliance (10GEA) boast that 10-Gigabit Ethernet is the only high-speed option worth considering. First, they point out, Ethernet accounts for more than 90% of the installed base of LAN nodes in enterprise networks, and for more than 95% of new nodes being shipped.
Second, Ethernet beats packet-over-SONET in cost, the 10GEA says. SONET router interfaces are expensive, and there are no SONET switches for link aggregation. Ethernet's switched architecture eliminates the need for point-to-point links, leaving fewer ports and links to manage. Ethernet networks in general are less expensive to administer, and there is a tremendous amount of Ethernet expertise among IT professionals.
Ethernet stacks up well against traditional WAN access technologies. T-1 links provide 1.5M bit/sec for $850 to $1,000 per month, while Ethernet-based MANs are delivering 100M bit/sec connections for about $3,000. That's more than 70 times the bandwidth for three times the cost.
Similarly, OC-12 takes an equipment investment of about $120,000 to deliver 620M bit/sec, and you need a specialized staff. Instead, you can buy a Gigabit Ethernet port for about $800.
Vendors haven't announced prices yet, but Dataquest expects initial 10-Gigabit Ethernet products with a LAN PHY to cost about three times more than its Gigabit Ethernet counterparts. Gear equipped with a SONET PHY will run about 10 times as much.
Equipment costs aside, Ethernet is also flexible and easy to deploy. In contrast, traditional WAN technologies can be rigid, with huge gaps between bandwidth options, and it can take weeks to get a new link deployed. Also, companies need different sets of time-division multiplexing equipment for each option.
In SONET environments, service providers build an OC-48 ring and sell four OC-12 connections, and then need to build another OC-48 ring to add more capacity. Ethernet lets them do just-in-time provisioning for customers, adding bandwidth in small increments.
The service provider can build out Ethernet networks a lot faster, too. Yipes Communications in San Francisco began deploying Ethernet MANs early this year and is now in nine markets nationwide.
"It has to be one of the fastest rollouts in history," says Frank Robles, vice president of operations. "It took US West five years to roll out frame relay in 14 markets."
Enterprise demand is lagging
In the enterprise, vendors and analysts don't expect 10-Gigabit Ethernet to take off until 2003.
One reason is the PC bus bottleneck. Even fairly high-end desktops can't take full advantage of a Gigabit Ethernet network channel, so the need for backbone aggregation won't grow as fast as it did for 100M Ethernet. Also, 10-Gigabit Ethernet is defined only over fiber, so copper backbones can't run it.
Yet, Cisco says it has some enterprise customers looking at 10-Gigabit Ethernet to aggregate Gigabit Ethernet ports. One of those customers is a medical research company creating a computer model of AIDS and modeling reactions to various treatments.
"It has basically built a supercomputer out of clustered Linux microcomputers linked via switched Gigabit Ethernet and it needs [10-Gigabit Ethernet] for the backbone," says Cisco product manager Bruce Tolley, a vice president of 10GEA. The alternative is to use parallel gigabit links, but it takes eight fibers to aggregate 4M bit/sec. 10-Gigabit Ethernet runs 10G bit/sec over two fibers.
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., could use 10-Gigabit Ethernet for a WAN-attached site grid under development. The grid will enable the transfer of massive amounts of data among supercomputer facilities.
"The idea is to maximize the use of the supercomputers by taking advantage of computing capacity whenever and wherever it is available," says Mike Bennett, a network engineer for the lab's Energy Sciences Network.
The lab views 10-Gigabit Ethernet as cost-effective bandwidth, and Bennett is talking to vendors about beta testing equipment. Bennet, however, has expressed some concern over the IEEE's recent decision to forego work on a short-wavelength 10-Gigabit Ethernet version for multimode fiber (see
story).
Storage-area networks and data center interconnections are other enterprise facilities that are likely early beneficiaries. Nortel Networks is working with some major vendors to connect next-generation server and storage elements directly to optical networks via 10-Gigabit Ethernet.
Nortel, Cisco and Extreme Networks expect to ship prestandard 10-Gigabit Ethernet products by year-end.
"We have already delivered the first step: a [wave-division multiplexing] blade that aggregates Gigabit Ethernet links over a single fiber," says Steve Haddock, Extreme's chief technology officer.
Nortel demonstrated carrier-class 10-Gigabit Ethernet technology at SuperComm in June and has announced a customer: Swedish service provider Utfors, which is deploying an end-to-end Ethernet network that will offer voice and data services.
"Today, enterprises would pay $4,600 per month for 4M bit/sec of voice and data services," says Carlos Zaidi, a strategic marketer for Nortel's 10-Gigabit Ethernet program in Ottawa. "Utfors can offer 100M bit/sec of service for the same price."
Breidenbach is a freelance technology journalist and consultant.
