Design & Reuse

Data Center Calls for 800GE Spec

Arista founder wants standard this year

Rick Merritt, EETimes
2/9/2017 00:01 AM EST

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Bandwidth-hungry data centers need a fast-track effort this year to define 800 Gbit/second Ethernet links, said a networking veteran. The existing IEEE process is too slow to serve the needs of Web giants, said Andreas Bechtolshiem, chairman of Arista Networks and a serial entrepreneur.

Network bandwidth has long been the bottleneck for companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, trying to connect thousands of servers to handle a flood of Web and mobile traffic. They are moving to 100GE connections this year and will start buying in volume as early as 2019 the 400G systems that are still in the lab today, he predicted.