Shaking Up the Office Network

    While I chronicled havoc the cloud was wreaking with my readers in computer companies, John D’Ambrosia found himself in the path of the same storm. D’Ambrosia ran groups that wrote the standards for Ethernet, the leading technology for sending data around on office networks.

Herding the cats of tech experts that define such industry standards is a volunteer gig for engineers that maintain a paying job at a company, typically one that has a strategic stake in the standards. In 2009, D’Ambrosia (left) worked for a large company that made connectors, the necessary but low-tech parts that link computers and networks. He sported a thick, close-cropped head of blond hair that ringed a boyish face, and he had a boy’s love for his golden retriever who perpetually slept at his feet, waiting under his desk for the endless telephone conference calls to end.

D’Ambrosia was well suited to the role of standards chairman: he was a people person who fed on the energy of getting to know everyone and their opinions on the tech in question. 

But the temperature in those discussions went up several notches once the cloud computing folks joined his meetings.

“A 16-terabit switch would be ideal, but it doesn't exist today,” said Donn Lee (below), a network engineer for Facebook at an Ethernet gathering I attended. “The biggest switch I can buy today handles about two terabits,” he said.

Bandwidth requirements were more than doubling every year for the largest networks in Facebook's data centers, Lee said. The clusters were used to compute data for the estimated 300 million users of the free web service.

“Anybody in the top 25 Web sites has this problem,” said Lee. “We are so busy building out networks, we don't have time to do these presentations,” he told an audience of engineers from more than 100 network systems and component makers.

Facebook had considered making his own high bandwidth switches out of off-the-shelf parts, a daunting task without faster chips. He called on developers to start work on a terabit Ethernet standard immediately.

Lee was asking them to squeeze four years work into a fortnight. Some sat slack-jawed to hear a big customer tell them they were moving like molasses.

“I would be happy if a 400-gigabit or a terabit effort would start today because the work takes four years,” Lee said. “We started today's 100G effort too late, though part of that was the fault of the dotcom bust,” in 2000, he added.

Then Lee dropped a bigger bomb. “You know we offer a free service—it's all funded by advertising—so cost is paramount to stay in business,” he said.

I called it “one of the central ironies of the Internet era.” Popular web sites and service providers were driving bandwidth requirements through the roof while pushing the costs of networking systems through the floor.

The new dynamic was forcing network engineers to consider starting work on a terabit Ethernet standard before they had finished their 100 Gbit spec. Worse, it got them scratching their heads about how they would get paid for their efforts.

“The whole industry economics are changing,” said a senior engineering manager with Cisco Systems. Unfortunately, “the industry lost a whole generation of good technology due to the dotcom bust,” he said.

A few months later, I attended three events where I heard the same refrain. Lee and others said their services can completely overwhelm the 10-gigabit per second Ethernet links they used in their warehouse-sized data centers and the standards for next-generation products were still being discussed.

“There are no 100-Gbit Ethernet products I can use now,” said Lee. But the kinds of MapReduce/Hadoop jobs Facebook developers and others use “can drive tremendous needs for bandwidth with just the press of a button,” he said.

By then, Amazon, Comcast, Google, Netflix, Sprint and Verizon were all active in the 100G standards groups. Sometimes each one wanted different features. “This is very different from when we were looking at 10-Gbit Ethernet,” said an exasperated D'Ambrosia who started writing opinion pieces for EE Times to try to calm the waters.

The big networking “customers are going to have to go back and sharpen their pencils because we are running into the limits of physics,” said D'Ambrosia in a mid-2011 story. By then had moved on to a no-doubt more lucrative position in the chief technologist’s office for a network systems vendor. Leading edge comms was becoming big business.

D'Ambrosia helped form a group of networking experts to wrestle with the question of how to respond to the calls from cloud giants. Could they essentially skip a whole generation of technology to catch up? The effort was buying time, trying to calm his rattled community.

In mid-2012, a breathless pace in Ethernet standards, the group released a report describing the crisis.

“Everyone is worried about the coming tsunami of data,” D’Ambrosia told me. “There’s a lot of nervousness out there about how people will handle it in a cost-effective manner,” he said.

The next big leap would require breakthroughs. “We need a fundamental technical paradigm shift to move to terabit, and nothing has emerged at this point,” said D’Ambrosia.

By the end of the year, he wrote an EE Times article explaining why he was convening a 400G standards effort.

“Terabit Ethernet would take too long to develop, cost too much to buy and it would have a very small market,” he wrote. “I say that, however, fully knowing that within a few years of ratifying a 400-gigabit Ethernet standard, we will need to “get the band back together” to once again ratchet up the speed…My friends tease me that I am not allowed to retire until Terabit Ethernet–or beyond!–is a reality.” 

By then, his blonde hair was already thinning and streaked with grey, but his golden retriever Tucker (right) was still under his desk, faithfully waiting for him to finish his work. 

Today, John is still driving Ethernet standards, including one motivated by the needs of AI. It’s exploring Ethernet speeds up to 3.2 terabits per second.

Next: A need for more than speed