Facebook needs Terabit Ethernet in their data centers
In a large data center like Facebook and Google, there are many high-speed servers that are processing as well as exchanging much data at extremely high speeds. It was reported according to Facebook’s Dunn Lee that the peak pipe speed required for Facebook data center server communications have reached 4 terabits/second. Currently the company is using 40Gb/s interfaces to interconnect these high-speed servers. Even though 100G Ethernet technology has been recently commercially available, the technology is however still not widely deployed. Different from the backbone high-speed transmission technology, the communications within data centers are generally based on short-reach technologies, which do not require a tight design on the transmission distances as in the long-distance fiber transmission technologies. For related news please see here.