100 Gigabit Ethernet
The 100 gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) is an advance technology of data transfer that is still on the stages of being materialized. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE first proposed the 802.3ba standard during a plenary meeting in July 2006.
The aim of the development of such project was to surpass the cutting-edge performance of their previous Ethernet technology. Presently, the honor of being the fastest service available still belongs to the 10 gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) technology, which boasts the power of being able to transmit on a speed of 10 gigabytes or 10 million bytes every second. The supposed 100GbE is expected to surpass such performance up until ten times.
After more than a year since it was originally brought up, the project was officially started in December 2007. A special committee called the P802.ba Task Force was instructed to work on the project. The project consists of releasing in both speeds of 40 and 100 gigabytes per second.
It was the first time that the IEEE will publish two speed classifications under one standard label. The reason for this is to offer a wide single-publication range that covers both the need of smaller local servers (40GbE) and extremely large internet servers (100GbE).
Although the 100 gigabit Ethernet is not yet expected to be released until around June 2010, some of its certain features have already been known. And through regular delivery of drafts by the P802.ba Task Force, the continuous improvements on the project have been visible.
Since October 2008 to February 2010, ten prototypes have been released. The 100GbE was tested to be able to identify with different physical layer (PHY) standards by the means of various attachable modules. These modules are allocated based of the distances they could cover. The CFP MSA, for instance, could be adopted up to more than a hundred meters.
While modules, such as CXP and QSFP, are made for shorter coverage. 100GbE technology is also anticipated to operate over different circuit boards like SMF (single mode optical fiber), MMF (OM3 multi mode optical fiber), backplane and copper assembly.
Currently, there is still no perfected 100GbE technology. However, various electronics and communications companies have already started to perform tests and sales on limited module availability. Based on the advances of the development of the project, it is safe to anticipate that not too long from now, 100GbE will definitely be a permanent part our vocabulary.
It has been such a wonderful technological phenomenon when the 10GbE was introduced to our lives, could you imagine how much more superior advantages we could get from the 100 Gigabit Ethernet technology?
