1000 Base-T has finally arrived

[spidey07]

Looking for comments on some stunning realizations I've had over the last 2 months.

1) Desktops/Laptops are coming with 10/100/1000 base NICs preinstalled
2) 10/100/1000 ports are quickly becoming the same price as 10/100 ports
3) 10 gig ethernet is a viable trunk today
4) Cat6 cable plant isn't much more than cat5 (10-15%)

Is it just me or do these trends sound all to familiar when 100 Base-T got a foothold in 1995/96.

The applications get fatter, the memory/storage/processor gets cheaper, the resource demand increases as a result. It's moores law for networks. I took a look at some of our global baselines today...Total network traffic for all monitored interfaces has increased 30% year over year for the last 4 years.

Gig to the desktop is coming, and it is coming just as fast and in the same fashion as 100 Base-T did. Prepare you're cable plants and equipment and make sure you are ready for wireless as well.

It ain't just cool technology, the business is DEMANDING it.

-edit- its late, forgive my grammar.

 

[cmetz]

spidey07, I fully agree.

See Cisco's 3750 announcement. See the high-density gig blade announcements from all the modular switch vendors.

See Hawking's and Linksys's SOHO 10/100/1000 switches.

See the NICs, good and cheap. Intel Pro/1000MT for $41 from Newegg. Intel or Broadcom gigE NICs being integrated into high-end motherboards now - an even cheaper way to do it. (I'm sure a few folks think I'm kinda crazy or biased for pushing the Intel adapter so much, but think about it in comparison with a $10ish RTL8139C board - so much better board for $30ish more, and many folks around here spend more than $30 on cables inside a PC...)

See Intel's announcement of a 10/100/1000 MAC that will wire into a special port on future north bridges for better performance (only a matter of time before that goes into the northbridge itself). This is key because current PCs have a hard time pushing close to a gig and having capacity left to do useful work, but a thoughtful north bridge interface would help a lot with that (let the gigE MAC DMA very close to DRAM and on a switched port not sucking up bandwidth for devices like disks).

This business is notorious for exponential growth in acceptance as the price goes down logarithmically. Prices are dropping fast and with it comes way more units sold and with that comes prices dropping more and so on.

Interesting that you see laptops with gig - that's something I've been looking for but NOT seeing.

 

[Santa]

oh no back to dummy terminals since i-Scsi is doable now

 

[rw120555]

I have a semi-related question: Homepna 3.0 will supposedly provide speeds of over 100 Mb. So, if you can get 100Mb out of crummy phone cable, why couldn't you get gigabyte speeds out of Cat5 cable? It would save some rewiring if you could. (Posts like Spidey's make me worry that my new home network is already hopelessly outdated.)

Home Phoneline Networking Alliance Selects Version 3.0 Technology Surpassing 100 Mbps Target

 

[djdrastic]

Yeah , and it seems to be a very low key type integration thing .It's kind of like we all know we're gonna have to do it at some time or another , while technologies like VOIP , L4/5 Routing and Fiber to the Desktop will seem to always remain , cool technologies but not need to have technologies.

Wireless is also starting to get out of its amateur phase , and getting more and more into the business phase of it's lifecycle.The WPA along with some really nifty products {Built In VPN Gateways etc} , has given wireless a new lease of life.

However , Spidey as you know it 's not implementing the Bandwidth that's hard , it's limiting users from using the hole pipe that can be much harder

Boyakasha !!

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Definitely interesting - and the fact that it about maxes out the pci bus means that it will also be one of the things that may push for pci express or whatever it is that they're replacing pci with. Also with cmetz mentioning this being put on northbridges, hopefully ethernet (gig ethernet ) will at least someday become a standard item on motherboards, I for one cannot wait until you can pack a whole x86 motherboard into a few chips, a bit of power regulating electronics, a socket, and some pcb. Basically the direction that mini-itx has taken, but to the extreme (wth sata instead of ide, less legacy stuff, etc).

 

[spidey07]

Its an interesting corollary between PCI/Gig Ethernet and 100 Base-T/PCI.

We faced this EXACT same problem/opportunity when 100 Base-T came out. ISA was the bus then.

"Man that PCI bus is going to be sweet for networks"

At many points in the evolution of networks the network has been faster than the hosts, Gig Ethernet is no exception. For a while you could not fill a 100 Base-T link on a server due to processor/interrupts/disk. Now its no problem, but even a Sun E6500 has a hard time maxing out a gig link.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: spidey07
At many points in the evolution of networks the network has been faster than the hosts, Gig Ethernet is no exception. For a while you could fill a 100 Base-T link on a server due to processor/interrupts/disk. Now its no problem, but even a Sun E6500 has a hard time maxing out a gig link.

Hmmm... just imagine the day when 1000bt will be considered old and slow, wonder what hard drives will be like at that point

 

[amcdonald]

Sorry for the laziness, but what are the specs for cat6?
Is it comaptible with typical rj-45 switches/hubs? is it available?

 

[Santa]

Is it the Disk I/O and Memory Subsystem that holds the the data from filling the pipe? If so what if we just ran iScsi or Diskless servers to SANs? Wouldn't that fill the pipe without a problem?

I personally would rather not see dummy terms but its getting more inviting as network speeds ramp up to meet with request.

 

[spidey07]

I think its mostly processor, the sun 6500 in test was an 8-way box and was running 90% utilization on all of them. Been a while since I've looked into it though.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: cmetz

Interesting that you see laptops with gig - that's something I've been looking for but NOT seeing.

The upper end powerbooks have had gig for a while I think. All Mac jokes (and MAC puns) aside, they are fairly spiffy little books

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: cmetz

Interesting that you see laptops with gig - that's something I've been looking for but NOT seeing.

The upper end powerbooks have had gig for a while I think. All Mac jokes (and MAC puns) aside, they are fairly spiffy little books

And G4 towers have had it for years now.

 

[cmetz]

spidey07, in my lab, I have two 1.4GHz P4 systems with I believe i850 and 128MB RDRAM, and 3c996B-T NICs. Running Linux (Red Hat 7.2) and netperf, I can move ~700Mb/s TCP between them in a synthetic benchmark (presumably, UDP would be more, but TCP is more useful). This leads me to believe that a mid-to-high end PC or Sun now should have no problem moving the bits asymptotic to 1Gb/s.

Doing anything USEFUL at 1Gb/s is still a ways off. But if you think of gigabit not as gigabit but as "more than 100Mb/s," you can be very happy with things for what they now cost. So you only get 200Mb/s of system throughput? That's still 100Mb/s more than you had. And if the NICs are cheap, which they certainly are now, it's a pretty obvious thing to do if performance matters to you.

 

[spidey07]

That's pretty impressive. The benchmarks that I was referring to are pretty old (> 2 years). It was from when I was moving to a fully redundant network for the hosts. Slap 2-4 gigabit cards going to two switches and fail a core or server switch.

Pretty cool really, the hosts and clients never even noticed a blip. Just the NIC software letting you know that it lost link on a card or two.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: spidey07
That's pretty impressive. The benchmarks that I was referring to are pretty old (> 2 years). It was from when I was moving to a fully redundant network for the hosts. Slap 2-4 gigabit cards going to two switches and fail a core or server switch.

Pretty cool really, the hosts and clients never even noticed a blip. Just the NIC software letting you know that it lost link on a card or two.

The E6500 is kind of old now. I wish I could get permission to test it on the 6800, 4800, or 3800...

 

[spidey07]

yeah, we're replacing all of our 6500s with 6800s this year.

Man its nice to have a rotating 3 year asset replacement on servers.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: cmetz

Interesting that you see laptops with gig - that's something I've been looking for but NOT seeing.

The upper end powerbooks have had gig for a while I think. All Mac jokes (and MAC puns) aside, they are fairly spiffy little books

And G4 towers have had it for years now.

yeah, but I'd NEVER put a mac on a network.

LOL, sorry had to. friendly jab.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: spidey07
yeah, we're replacing all of our 6500s with 6800s this year.

Man its nice to have a rotating 3 year asset replacement on servers.

I'm jealous. I only have one of each (6800, 4800, 3800)