Vendors Launch 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium

 A collection of leading cloud and infrastructure providers recently announced that they are launching a new consortium to “set an industry standard definition of the 25 Gbps and 50 Gbps Ethernet physical layer and media access control layer ….” The 25G Ethernet Consortium will focus on building standards for supporting 25 and 50Gbps networking across rack-mounted systems in data center and HPC environments.
Founding members of the consortium include Arista, Broadcom, Google, Mellanox, and Microsoft. According to the announcement, the new standard will prescribe a single-lane 25 and dual-lane 50 Gigabit Ethernet protocol, enabling “up to 2.5X higher performance per physical lane or twinax copper wire between the rack endpoint and the switch compared to current 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps Ethernet links.”
According to Arista Senior VP Anshul Sadana, “With ever-increasing server performance, and with the uplinks from the leaf to the spine layer migrating to 100 Gbps in the near future, it makes sense to increase the access speed from 10 Gbps to 25 and 50 Gbps.”
The goal of the consortium is to help member companies roll out specification-compatible products in the next 12 to 18 months.