40Gigabit Ethernet
When 10G Ethernet becomes too slow, the next step up will likely be 40G bit/sec.
With at least a few cutting-edge research facilities already offering 10G to the desktop, Cisco executives predicted in mid-2003 that 40G could become technically feasible within two years. As the speed of connections to individual clients increases, the "uplinks" that feed the aggregate traffic of many clients up to the backbone of a network tends to follow suit.
Cisco's flagship chassis-based enterprise switch line, the Catalyst 6500 Series, already can support 40G bit/sec per interface card with the recently introduced Supervisor Engine 720, which boosts total switching capacity to 720G bit/sec per chassis.
However, standards groups, such as the IEEE, have yet to actually define 40G specifications (let alone figure out how to get that much data into and out of devices such as servers). One reason to try to move Ethernet from 10G to 40G is to match up with the 40G WAN OC-768 specification.
Additional resources
The next Ethernet
40G or 100G? LinuxWorld, 06/03/03.
Gigabit Ethernet research center
Latest gigabit news and analysis from Network World Fusion.
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