Spirent, Napatech announcement shows promise of speed and scalability

Spirent, best known for testing, measurement and service assurance solutions, today announced it would partner with network analysis company Napatech to demonstrate at Interop 2011 a data center virtualization environments supporting 40G Ethernet (GbE) server interfaces.

The announcement is one of many these past few weeks related to the IEEE’s 40GbE standard, which was ratified last year. The standard is important because it means Ethernet frames can be sent at 40 and 100 gigabits per second over multiple 10 Gb/s or 25 Gb/s lanes. That means a significant increase in bandwidth is possible with previously purchased network operations, management equipment and interfaces (e.g., 802.3). By providing a physical layer specification for communication across backplanes, copper cabling, multimode fiber and singlemode fiber, organizations can send Ethernet frames at much faster rates than the previously accepted 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard.

For service providers seeing an explosion in the number of mobile edge devices, this could mean great things down the road, as data, applications and bandwidth demands increase. Today, a single user might in a single day use a smartphone, a laptop, a tablet, VoIP and a PC. As these devices access data and apps increasingly from data centers and/or cloud environments, there will be huge scalability requirements, and 40GbE might be the enabling factor.

As IT organizations upgrade their datacenter backbones, it seems support for the 40 Gigabit Ethernet standard is growing as a means for interconnecting equipment to accommodate growing distance and bandwidth requirements.

The fact the 802.3ba task force responsible for developing the 40GbE standard has managed to release numerous drafts, each providing faster data transfer speeds than ever possible before, is promising, as it is enabling IT departments to maintain their investments in the previous 10Gb3 technologies while growing and scaling.