Progress in energy efficiency
This past week I've been off meeting with the IEEE task force on energy efficient ethernet (802.3az), something I've mentioned before. The group is working hard to define operating modes for systems during periods of low link utilization. Now, while most of us think of our electric bills on the scale of days, weeks and months, the EEE group is looking to optimize utilization at the time scale of microseconds. A longtime industry veteran in the group pointed out that this is a return to the old days of ethernet when the only time transmission occured was when there was data, and a preamble signalled the receiver and facilitated its wakeup.
One of the most interesting discussions was around congested networks in the data center. Within this group, it was somewhat universally stated that this was no longer an issue for gigabit networks, because those were being scaled to 10gigabits when congestion raised its ugly head. A scant few years ago, I can recall that not being the case. The future looks bright for 10 Gigabit.
In addition, the group is making progress towards a specification. Proposals were baselined for low-power idles for 100 and 1000BASE-T, and proposals were made for a low-power idle mode for 10GBASE-T, which promises to cut power during low-utilization periods by up to 80%. This has the potential to rapidly accelerate 10gigabit to the desktop, by allowing quick bursts of speed when required, without the power penalty.
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