Juniper revs Ethernet to 100Gbps

Juniper Networks has announced the industry's first 100Gbps Ethernet router interface card.

The networking company unveiled the 100Gbps Ethernet interface on Monday. The card will be sold as part of Juniper's T1600 core router, which is a high-performance product aimed mostly at telecommunications providers, but also usable by cloud-infrastructure companies and others rolling out large-scale virtualization.

"[100Gbps Ethernet] has always been inevitable, it has just been a question of when--now trends such as cloud computing, data center consolidation and virtualization are making the need for [100Gbps Ethernet] more acute and urgent than ever before," Opher Kahane, Juniper's general manager of high-end systems, said in a statement.

The 100Gbps Ethernet standard has not been published yet. Right now, it is being incubated, alongside 40Gbps Ethernet, by the IEEE's P802.3ba Ethernet task force, with final publication not expected for a year, at least. The fastest currently published Ethernet standard is 10Gbps.

Juniper's 100Gbps Ethernet interface card is "expected to be deployed in customer pilot networks before the end of 2009", the company said, but did not say why the product was being released before the standard is finalised.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[explodingzebras]

Yeah, would be great though I've always taken ethernet (and USB) speeds with a pinch of salt, it still depends on hard disk I/O, cables etc. Sometimes I get only 5-20mbits/sec on my through my gigabit switch when transferring around 6GB of data.

[Dalkorian]

A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.

[timber2005]

I don't think you realize this but... you probably won't see a 100Gbps interface card in a pc or home switch. This is for data centers between 2 switches or routers, and those switches and routers cost in the thousands, plus ~800 for each interface add-on card.