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New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

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Re: New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

#21

Post by jandrese »

walrus01 wrote: post #3
bjoli wrote: post #2

Does aanyone here work with consuming (not just passing it kn) these amounts of traffic? How do you manage to get anything meaningful out of it?

network engineer here: nobody connects a 200 or 400GbE interface linecard off a router to a single anything... The purpose is for ISP-to-ISP interconnections for truly huge amounts of traffic. For example direct peering in the same IX/carrier hotel between a huge source of content (youtube/google, netflix, etc) and a huge ISP (comcast, centurylink). For a big ISP, also things like 100GbE connections from a city's pai…

The only potential consumers I can imagine are like the Great Firewall of China traffic monitoring systems.

Re: New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

#22

Post by simias »

bjoli wrote: post #2

Does aanyone here work with consuming (not just passing it kn) these amounts of traffic? How do you manage to get anything meaningful out of it?

Streaming uncompressed raw video over ethernet for TV production. It's still commonly done over dark fiber but people are slowly migrating towards IP. A single uncompressed 4K video stream is over 12Gbps, 1080p is 3Gbps and obviously when you're producing content you have a few of these running alongside each other (multiple cameras, feedback, big screens etc... Think something like the world cup or superbowl). It quickly adds up to a tremendous bandwidth. On top of that it needs very low latency and jitter to keep all the streams synchronized.

Re: New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

#23

Post by ksec »

Osiris wrote: post #11

I wonder when we will start seeing > 1Gpbs Ethernet in consumer products. I've read about initiatives for 5 or 10Gb consumer Ethernet. I'd love to be able to push/pull from my NAS at > 100MB/s.

Cost. 1Gbps Ethernet Router, Switches, SerDes, Controller, everything is a magnitude cheaper then 10Base-T or NBase-T ( 2.5/5Gbps Ethernet)

Apart from some Prosumer and Business usage there just isn't enough market to scale this down to a cost competitive product. I think it may possibly remain as a niche. ( Please Prove me wrong as I too want my NAS to transfer at 500MB/s )

I saw some article suggest Small Cells in 4.9G/5G or 802.11ax WiFi will be key to this acceleration, both are coming in 2019.

Re: New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

#24

Post by francoisLabonte »

The real debate is between OSPF and QSFP-DD as they are the only ones with a shot at high density.

QSFP-DD is backwards compatible so that you can run your 400G port as a 100G or 40G with 4 lanes at 25G/10G. OSFP will be able to do the same thing but with an adapter from OSFP to QSFP

But what this article fails to mention is that OSFP is the connector of the future that will support 8 lanes of 100G to support 800G ethernet with good signal integrity and capability to support high power optics for longer distances. ( This looks to be in 2020 )

So QSFP-DD is a 1 generation connector...

OSFP will see us through 400G and 800G.

Disclaimer I work at Arista Networks who is bullish on OSFP.

For more info see Andy Bechtolsheim's talk on 400G optics at OCP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kotu6B7AQpk

Re: New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

#25

Post by icebraining »

jandrese wrote: post #21
walrus01 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

network engineer here: nobody connects a 200 or 400GbE interface linecard off a router to a single anything... The purpose is for ISP-to-ISP interconnections for truly huge amounts of traffic. For example direct peering in the same IX/carrier hotel between a huge source of content (youtube/google, netflix, etc) and a huge ISP (comcast, centurylink). For a big ISP, also things like 100GbE connections from a city's pai…

The only potential consumers I can imagine are like the Great Firewall of China traffic monitoring systems.

Or the NSA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Re: New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

#26

Post by walrus01 »

dweekly wrote: post #20
Osiris wrote: post #11

I wonder when we will start seeing > 1Gpbs Ethernet in consumer products. I've read about initiatives for 5 or 10Gb consumer Ethernet. I'd love to be able to push/pull from my NAS at > 100MB/s.

It's a fair question; I suspect most of the reason for the lag is that consumer internet connections rarely offer >1gbps, consumer LAN applications requiring >1gbps of traffic haven't emerged (for NAS/SAN, a directly connected USB 3 is probably the way to go for 10gbps transfer, which is what you're looking for here), and WiFi - how most people are connecting their consumer devices to the network - doesn't offer more…

one of the major use cases for 802.3bz is high bandwidth WAPs, specifically things that can actually pull more than 1 Gbps of data... to actually achieve that with wifi standards usually requires:

1) dual, separate 2.4 and 5.x GHz radios

2) 3x3 MIMO

3) 802.11ac wave2 (1024QAM)

4) use of really wide channel sizes, even an 80 MHz wide 802.11ac channel won't get near 1 Gbps aggregate throughput, needs to be the ridiculous 160 MHz channel size in the 5.x GHz part 15 frequencies.

5) all of the above combined, or more than two radios in an AP such as expensive high density Xirrus or Ruckus WAPs which can have two or three separate 5.x GHz radios in one physical body.

Re: New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

#27

Post by gsich »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #7

I remember having to schedule a 780Kb download overnight and hoping no one picked the phone up. Or years later having to download shows in advance (illegally because they weren’t available) because streaming wasn’t possible. Now I casually (and legally) boot up any show I feel like within seconds at HD resolutions. I love thinking about the sheer amount of data that is traversing around the internet now. And it’s mor…

Bandwidth is not the issue in PUBG.

Re: New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

#28

Post by gsich »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #18
sgtmas2006 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

60hz even is low today by competitive standards for FPS games. 128 is nice, it should be a minimum.

Often it’s only on LAN games for tourneys where the tick rate is that high. With internet latency or bandwidth requirements at that rate you are going to start dropping more and more packets and suffer from potentially more client side mispredictions.

Packet loss is usually very low. 1% and the game will most likely be unplayable.

Re: New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

#29

Post by walrus01 »

francoisLabonte wrote: post #24

The real debate is between OSPF and QSFP-DD as they are the only ones with a shot at high density. QSFP-DD is backwards compatible so that you can run your 400G port as a 100G or 40G with 4 lanes at 25G/10G. OSFP will be able to do the same thing but with an adapter from OSFP to QSFP But what this article fails to mention is that OSFP is the connector of the future that will support 8 lanes of 100G to support 800G et…

I am also optimistic about OSFP as compared to the QSFP size for 400G. I'm not a laser engineer but I do have a pretty good understanding of how 400G will be achieved through two strands of singlemode. For medium reach optics it's actually an 8-channel CWDM with prism built into each optic, so the optic body needs to be large enough to dissipate the heat from eight separate 25 Gbps lasers. CFP size will obviously handle that but is a true first generation solution and is huge.

The only bad thing about OSFP is that its highly similar name will confuse the hell out of network engineers who never see the OSI layer 1 of a network, and deal with things at OSI layer 3.

OSFP != OSPF (the routing protocol).

Re: New Optical Form Factors for 400 Gigabit Ethernet

#30

Post by agoodthrowaway »

francoisLabonte wrote: post #24

The real debate is between OSPF and QSFP-DD as they are the only ones with a shot at high density. QSFP-DD is backwards compatible so that you can run your 400G port as a 100G or 40G with 4 lanes at 25G/10G. OSFP will be able to do the same thing but with an adapter from OSFP to QSFP But what this article fails to mention is that OSFP is the connector of the future that will support 8 lanes of 100G to support 800G et…

Sorry but OSFP has at most a life of 2 generations and likely only useful for a single generation. 112G SERDES is not going to scale well and will require repeaters all over the place. Moreover doubling the signaling rate to 224 Gb/s is wholly impractical. The future is embedded devices and not legacy pluggables.
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