
Speeding up the Internet by bouncing data off the ceiling - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/109765-speeding-up-the-internet-by-bouncing-data-off-the-ceiling
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iradik
Link to actual paper:
[http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/publications/pdf/beam3d-hot...](http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/publications/pdf/beam3d-hotnets11.pdf)

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amphigory
"For example, if the baseline traffic on a data center network is 1Gbps, but
peaks at 10Gbps for just a few minutes at lunch time… do you wire the entire
data center up with costly 10Gbps gear, or just admit that there’ll be lots of
latency and packet loss at peak times?"

Heh. The article makes this a 1G or 10G choice. Haven't they heard of 802.3ad?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation>

Kludge.

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jws
Did you see that cunning sleight of verbiage?

 _1Gbps_ is a single link speed.

 _10Gbps_ is an aggregate for all links in the data center.[1]

Even $99 low end consumer ethernet switches have an aggregate speed of 16Gbps.

For this to make any sense at all you have to have a switch in the rack
aggregating traffic but still be using a 1Gbps ethernet back to a more central
switch. The cost of a 10Gbps link isn't too bad when spread over a rack of
equipment. Compare that to the cost of an RF system that has to be engineered
for the exact physical installation, still needs a >1Gbps uplink port on the
rack switch, and silently breaks if someone sets a cardboard box on top of a
rack.

[1] Their number, not mine. The report talks about using the spatial
restrictions of the links to make many "multiple Gbps" links in the same
space.

~~~
ismarc

       Even $99 low end consumer ethernet switches have an aggregate speed of 16Gbps.
    

Not really. Most only have a 1 or 2 Gbps backplane and you're talking about
absurdly priced switches that have a backplane that will support full
saturation on all ports.

~~~
jws
I'm talking about a Netgear GS108Tv2, just because that what is sitting on my
desk at the moment. It claims 16Gbps right there in the brochure. This is a
notch above the lower end, it has a management interface, VLANs, QoS, port
authentication, and a lot of other features from real switches.

Of course it also claims lifetime warranty but somehow that doesn't work after
90 days, so maybe the 16Gbps is not true either. In a testament to their
opinion of their product, Netgear will sell you a warranty that does work for
a couple years for only a bit more than the cost of the switch itself.

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obtu
It's interesting, but are bandwidth hotspots so unpredictable that one can't
lay a few wires to alleviate them, without adding new hardware?

