25G Ethernet on Tap at IEEE

Rick Merritt, EETimes
7/21/2014 07:35 PM EDT

SAN JOSE, Calif. — In the wake of a June launch for an industry consortium that's driving 25 Gbit/s Ethernet for use in data centers, an IEEE 802.3 group voted last week to pursue a standard for the technology.

At a July 15 meeting, 121 of 148 engineers voted to start a group to work on the interface that will link rack-mounted servers to top-of-rack switches in large data centers. Fifty-nine people at the meeting said they would join the group. Representatives of 39 companies expressed interest.

In a straw poll at a March IEEE meeting, just 30 engineers voted to start a 25G standards effort, with 27 voting against and 21 abstaining. At that time, representatives of 25 companies expressed support for such an effort.

A panel kicked off the meeting making the case for 25G as the next step from today's 1 and 10G links, leveraging an emerging class of 25G SerDes. They included representatives from Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, Intel, and Microsoft.

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