Next Generation Ethernet Data Center

“Is bandwidth growth exceeding network technology?”, asked Andy Bach, Senior VP of Technology at NYSE Euronext.  Andy followed up with an interesting presentation on what it takes to be competitive as low-latency, high-frequency traders have begun to drive the business more and more.

Jason Hoffman, a founder and the CTO of Joyent, an on-demand infrastructure and cloud computing company that serves billions of page views and traffics hundreds of millions of emails per month.  Jason spent some time talking about cloud computing IO requirements, virtualization and scalability.

Donn Lee, senior engineer at Facebook, stated “Facebook’s data centers already need 100 Gigabit Ethernet, and where we’re going for our upgrades, there is already a need for 1 Terabit. Facebook has so many servers, and those servers can process data so fast, that they could fill 64 Terabit Ethernet pipes in the backbone of one data center.”

These and many more questions were addressed at the second Ethernet Alliance Technology Exploration Forum held February 2 in Santa Clara, CA.  The objective of this forum was to bring together experts in the Ethernet industry to discuss the needs, applications, adoption and deployment of the Next Generation Ethernet Data Center. The day opened with a keynote from Seamus Crehan, VP at Dell’Oro Group, on The Opportunities and Challenges of the Next Generation Ethernet Data Center which was followed by various panels, sessions and keynotes on topics such cloud networking, end user needs, convergence in the data center, virtualization, higher speed Ethernet, just to name a few.