The new bottleneck

I’m here in San Diego for OFC/NFOEC, a large conference and trade show for the fiber-optics industry. The buzz around here is that now that enough people have more communications bandwidth, it’s putting stress on the core networks. As a result, all the hype is about 100 Gbit/s Ethernet (IEEE 802.3ba), a standard that won’t be ratified for perhaps two years. Yet already, people are saying that 100 Gbit/s isn’t enough.

In a panel discussion just ended, Donn Lee, a network engineer for Facebook, described his data centers. These centers have tens of thousands of servers–all commodity PCs. With 66 million active users and adding 1 million users a week, Facebook is the 6th most used web site in the U.S. Lee told an audience that he’d use 100 Gbit/s links on his Ethernet switches if they were available today and that he needs terabit Ethernet by 2011, which won’t happen. Then, Dave D’Andrea of Avago Technologies talked about how much bandwidth the 18-to-29-year olds and YouTube consume. "It all comes from servers through core networks to you," he said. Add that to the fact that Netflix is going to all download delivery of movies and you have trememdous strain coming to core networks. It’s the new bottleneck.