John D’Ambrosia, writing over at redOrbit, outlines progress being made on ethernet for the datacenter beyond 10 GbE
Higher-speed standards are on the way for both data centers and computing applications. Prior to its inception as a task force, the IEEE 802.3 higher-speed study group received input that service provider networks, Internet exchange networks, consumer broadband access networks, content provider networks, enterprise networks, data center networks, research and development networks, and high- performance computing networks all needed 100-Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE)-and many expressed the need for thinking even beyond 100 GbE. At the same time, these organizations were calling for 40-Gigabit Ethernet development for computing applications.
