The push is on to cut 100G Ethernet's price

Less than a year afterwards 100-Gigabit Ethernet was standardized, an industry group is considering a set of specifications that might make the high-speed innovation less expensive and more useful.

The IEEE 802

The IEEE 802.3 100-Gigabit Backplane and Copper Cable Study Group of the IEEE isn't trying to change the 100GE standard nevertheless to make it easier to build modules with more 100GE ports, according to John D'Ambrosia, who is chairman of the new group. Its first meeting took place last month. D'Ambrosia spoke on the sidelines of the Ethernet Innovation Summit on Tuesday in Santa Clara, California, although he emphasized that he was not speaking on behalf of the study group.

The effort to develop specifications for 100GE backplanes, which provide the connections within a switch, comes as the IEEE as well starts to explore the possible need for an even faster standard. An ad hoc group will begin meeting on Monday to study users' current bandwidth requirements, which could help determine the demand for a version of Ethernet above 100G bps. However while a new speed record may be enticing, network engineers in the real world need to wire their data centers at low cost and be prepared for future needs, according to D'Ambrosia.

Example of 100GE pricing

As an example of 100GE pricing, Juniper Networks typically charges ten times the price per port of 10-Gigabit Ethernet, so a 100GE port may cost about $US150,000, although prices vary, said Luc Ceuppens, vice president of marketing for platform systems.

A key challenge to increasing the port density of 100GE switch modules is that the current innovation for connecting an interface module to a switch chassis typically won't support more than one or two 100GE ports, D'Ambrosia said. Current innovation won't scale beyond that. Virtualization has made the problem even harder, because a data center full of virtualized servers tends to use the network more intensively, he said.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com