The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium formed by Google, Microsoft, Arista Networks, Broadcom and Mellanox starts work on an industry-standard specification for a 25Gbps and 50Gbps ethernet protocol.
The consortium aims to not only boost performance but also slash internet costs per Gbps between server Network Interface Controller (NIC) and Top-of-Rac (ToR) switch.
In comparison to current 10 and 40Gbps ethernet links the single-lane 25 and dual-lane 50Gbps links will enable up to 2.5x higher performance per physical lane or twinax copper wire between rack endpoint and switch, at least according to the consortium.
The finished definitional will cover physical layer (PHY) and media access control layer (MAC) behavior, including virtual lane alignment, autonegotiation and forward error correction characteristics.
"The companies joining the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium are taking a major step forward in increasing the performance of data center networks,” Arista Networks says. “With ever-increasing server performance and with the uplinks from the leaf to the spine layer migrating to 100 Gbps in the near future, it makes sense to increase the access speed from 10Gbps to 25 and 50Gbps.”
The consortium hopes 25 and 50Gbps compliant implementations will roll out over the next 12-18 months through the membership of multiple semiconductor, networking equipment and interconnect vendor members.