AT&T trialed 802.3ba-compliant interface even though standard ratified last week
The IEEE ratified the 802.3ba – aka, 40/100G Ethernet – standard last week as expected. Compliant products are expected to soon flood the market.
So what does this mean to 40/100G Ethernet products already on the market? Some were in trials late last year and early this year, and the IEEE says changes to the 802.3ba spec were made right up until March 2010.
Anyone releasing anything before the ratified standard is “taking a risk,” in the words of John D’Ambrosia, chair of the IEEE 802.3ba Task Force.
Juniper, which trialed its 100G Ethernet router interface last fall and is taking orders for it now, says it will not have to modify the product in order to be standards compliant. The changes made in March do not “materially impact” the product released before the ratified standard, Juniper says.
Cisco, too, has been trialing a 100G Ethernet interface on its new CRS-3 router at AT&T before the ratified 802.3ba standard. Despite its early bird status, Cisco says this product is nonetheless compliant with the newly ratified standard:
“As we expected, IEEE adhered to its timeline to ratify this month the 802.3ba standard,” a company spokesperson e-mailed to Network World. “Cisco is well represented in this effort and contributing to its development. Our engineering team closely tracked its ratification and has been building a standards-compliant implementation that does not compromise in performance. For example, our 100GE implementation features a single-flow architecture (using one 100G forwarding ASIC) instead of multiple-flows (using say two 50G forwarding ASICs) that others chose for time-to-market considerations.”
The CRS-3 with the 100G Ethernet interface will ship in the third quarter.
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