It’s been over a year since the first 40 and 100Gbps ethernet products saw the light of day; but there was no official standard yet. All that changed this week, with the official publication of the IEEE 802.3ba standard. Most vendors will be quick to update their products to conform to the official standard; there were only a couple of minor changes compared to the previous drafts.
With most storage networks still at 1 Gbps iSCSI or 4/8 Gbps FC, 40 or even 100 Gbps equipment might be a couple of years away. Nevertheless this announcement might provide benefits for those that are still on 1 Gbps networks: 10 Gbps ethernet equipment is expected to become more affordable now that it’s no longer a premium product. The same thing happened to 1 Gbps equipment when 10 Gbps started to become more mainstream.
This new standard also makes one thing very clear: the days of copper cabling in the data center are numbered. For 10 Gbps networks there was always the option of using (incredibly power-consuming) 10GBASE-T connections; these could traverse up to 100 meters of UTP cable. For 40 and 100 Gbps ethernet, the maximum distance for these old cables is just 10 meters, using 40GBASE-CR4 and 100GBASE-CR10 standards. Those that need larger cable runs will have to standardise on fiber; multi-mode fiber will suffice for distances of up to 100 m.
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