The IEEE gears up for the next Ethernet standard

Completing an Ethernet specification takes years of effort. Just ask John D’Ambrosia of Futurewei who has spent the last 15 years chairing various IEEE Ethernet standards.

John D'Ambrosia

He oversaw the standardisation of 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 200/400GbE and he is now chairing two IEEE Task Forces standards addressing 100 and 400 coherent Ethernet.

He is also the Chair of the group looking at new Ethernet applications (NEA) or to give it its full title, the IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections NEA Ad Hoc group.

D’Ambrosia is driving the development of the ‘Beyond 400 Gigabit’ Call-for-Interest work of the NEA group that will define the next Ethernet standard.

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NextIO simplifies top of rack switching with I/O virtualisation

NextIO has developed virtualised input/output (I/O) equipment that simplifies switch design in the data centre.

"Our box takes a single virtual NIC, virtualises that and shares that out with all the servers in a rack"

John Fruehe, NextIO 

The platform, known as vNET, replaces both Fibre Channel and Ethernet top-of-rack switches in the data centre and is suited for use with small one rack unit (1RU) servers. The platform uses PCI Express (PCIe) to implement I/O virtualisation.

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