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How Ethernet Is Addressing Today's Networking Needs
Ethernet is the technology that just keeps giving. Ovum believes the global enterprise Ethernet services market will see a compound annual growth rate of 10.7 percent between now and 2020, when it is forecast to reach $70 billion. But like most long-lived technologies, business Ethernet has had to grow and stretch to meet evolving needs.
It’s done so by scaling up to support bigger and better bandwidth rates. And new Ethernet-related standards are allowing for broader applications of enterprise Ethernet services and the ability for Ethernet network operators to have greater flexibility in what they can do without enormous new investments.
The MEF and the Optical Internetworking Forum are two of the industry groups that have contributed to that. And they continue their work to make sure Ethernet meets current and future networking requirements.
“Expansion of MEF 3.0 standardization work beyond Ethernet to include IP, SD-WAN, and Layer 1 services is critical for enabling the streamlined interconnection and orchestration of a mix of connectivity services across multiple providers,” MEF CTO Pascal Menezes said earlier this year. “Combining this work with the ongoing development of our emerging suite of LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) APIs will pave the way for orchestrated delivery of on-demand, cloud-centric services with unprecedented user- and application-directed control over network resources and service capabilities.”
As for OIF, it has been working on a new standard called FlexE. It decouples the Ethernet MAC rate from the physical interface to give service providers the ability to get higher capacity without waiting for standard pluggable interfaces to be defined and introduced. It supports such Ethernet MAC rates as 10GbE, 40GbE, and nx25GbE, and allows for remotely controlled Ethernet rate changes.
Such efforts assist service providers offering business Ethernet offerings the ability to address business requirements for bigger bandwidth, lower latency, greater security, and the ability to support important new technologies like SD-WAN and virtualization. Ciena’s Vice President of Sales Dan Chillcott in this May blog wrote “consider adding Ethernet services for high-capacity services, from 1GbE to 10GbE and 100GbE and beyond, to offer a differentiated and competitive service to your corporate customers. Not only will it add a cost-effective alternative to some existing services, it will also ensure your business Ethernet offerings are set up to complement SD-WAN and hybrid network services.”
Edited by Maurice Nagle
