* Checking in on jumbo frames
I’ve always thought that jumbo frames were a simple technology that could have had broad usage in LANs. It turned out that the usage didn’t become that broad, but the technology reportedly has been quite useful in some situations.
Jumbo frames are intended to speed large data transfers. Ethernet specifies a certain frame size – 1,518 bytes – and that requires that large files be chopped up into chunks of that size, with all the overhead that must accompany each frame. If you can increase the frame size, large files don’t have to be sent in as many small chunks, so you don’t have to work as hard and you don’t need as much frame-related overhead.
The biggest drawback is that the technology wasn’t standardized, despite some vendors’ best efforts.
However, I can go back more than a year and see tests that showed a range of vendors – Allied Telesyn, Avaya, Cisco, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks, NEC and Nortel – could pass jumbo frames going up to 9,000 bytes in size without compatibility issues:
https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2002/0826bg4.html
There may even be more vendors out there that could interoperate, that simply weren’t tested.
So, with that in mind, what do you think? Is the lack of a standard still an issue? Are you using jumbo frames today? If so, how? I’m interested in your responses. Send your views to mailto:jcaruso@nww.com and I’ll share the feedback in an upcoming newsletter.
