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A series of tests designed to evaluate and improve interoperability for 25Gb and 50Gb Ethernet technologies have been successfully completed in the US, the organisation behind the event has announced.
The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium recently organised the recent plugfest event at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory in Durham, New Hampshire, in order to provide a forum for members to collaborate. The industry body has been established to develop 25Gb and 50Gb Ethernet specifications and its members include Cisco, Google and Microsoft.
The event attracted record participation from consortium members looking to ensure interoperability of feature sets and configurability between their products. A total of 16 companies were present for the week-long event, where they underwent a wide variety of test scenarios including auto-negotiation and stressed conditions.
Outcomes were said to be highly positive, with the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium noting that tests demonstrated a high degree of multi-vendor interoperability for the technology, as well as strong conformance to key specifications.
Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research, described the outcome of the plugfest as an encouraging sign for the technology, as it ensures vendors are conforming to a single standard, while the success of the plugfest highlights the technology's maturity.
This will be good news for the networking industry as a whole as more companies seek to deploy 25Gb and 50Gb solutions in the coming years, in order to cope with greater demand for bandwidth and high volumes of data. Strong interoperability between products from different vendors will be essential in helping networking professionals build robust, reliable solutions easily and cost-effectively.
Vittal Balasubramanian, chair of the 25G/50G Ethernet Interop Committee and principal signal integrity engineer at Dell, said: "In order to handle the increasing amount of data, server architectures all too often require multiple 10Gb ports. 25Gb Ethernet arrives just in time and has started its climb towards dominance as the leading server-to-ToR switch interconnect."
He added that as this transition gathers pace, plugfests such as this will reassure users that speeds of 25Gbps and greater will perform as advertised with solid plug-and-play interoperability between different vendors.
Following the successful outcome of the latest event, the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium has opted to make its specification available to the public. Brad Booth, chair of the 25G Ethernet Consortium, also stated the organisation is looking forward to future events to further evaluate interoperability between its specification and IEEE standards.
