It’s clearly evident from the evolution of technology that the “need for speed” seems to be deeply embedded in human nature. Reflecting back without going too far back in history, the horse and buggy was the main mode of transportation, unfortunately not fast enough. So we invented the locomotive, automobile, airplane, fax machine, e-mail, and mobile phones with text messaging among the hundreds of other inventions to fulfill our need to do things faster.
Being a networking guy, I might be biased, but I see networks as the new frontier for speed, especially now that we are a media/information driven society. It wasn’t long ago that a 10Mbps shared Ethernet LAN and 56kbps WAN links were considered fast (showing my age here). However, every time faster networking speeds were introduced, newer applications quickly consumed the capacity driving the need for even higher speeds.
Over the years we’ve seen Ethernet speeds increase in increments of 10x starting with 10Mbps to 100Mbps to 1GE and 10GE and now, we’re again at another speed inflection point -100Gigabit Ethernet! This week Cisco added to our 100GE router portfolio (CRS and ASR routers) with the announcement of a 100GE M2-Series module for the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches. Along with the 100GE module, we also announced a 40GE M2-Series module for the Nexus 7000 and a 40GE module for the Catalyst 6500.
