40 gigabit Ethernet and 100 gigabit Ethernet: The development of a flexible architecture [Commentary]

In December 2007 the IEEE Standards Association approved the formation of the IEEE P802.3ba Task Force, which was chartered with the development of 40 Gb Ethernet and 100 Gb Ethernet. The decision to do both rates of Ethernet was scrutinized by the industry at the time, but ultimately the Higher Speed Study Group provided a vital forum for the stakeholders in the next generation of Ethernet to debate this very issue. The fact that this debate actually occurred is in itself a testament to the success of Ethernet. Networking applications, whose bandwidth requirements are doubling approximately every 18 months, have greater bandwidth demands than computing applications, where the bandwidth capabilities for servers are doubling approximately every 24 months. The impact of this difference in bandwidth growth is illustrated in Fig. 1. It is clear from these trend lines that if Ethernet is to provide a solution for both the computing and network application space, it needs to evolve past its own tradition of 10x leaps in operation rates with each successive generation.