Is your Ethernet fast enough Four new speeds are in the works

Having building blocks in multiples of 25 will become more important as cloud data centers age, Weckel said. It should let network engineers reuse technology as needs and speeds grow.

"Right now, all clouds are greenfield, but as the cloud matures, and actually has a real business model and has to actually talk to Wall Street and explain the billions of dollars that they spend on every data center, you're going to see reuse become very important," Weckel said.

By contrast, 40-Gigabit Ethernet is made up of four lanes of 10-Gigabit Ethernet, a technology that the cloud giants are now outgrowing, Ethernet Alliance's D'Ambrosia said. They need more than 10Gbps for each server, even as average enterprises start to connect more servers at that speed.

Google, Microsoft and several prominent networking vendors formed a group in early July to promote standardization of 25Gbps and 50Gbps Ethernet, saying they couldn't wait for the IEEE to finish a standard. Later that month, the IEEE started its own 25Gbps task group and said it might be done in as little as 18 months. On Thursday, D'Ambrosia said he doesn't necessarily agree with that forecast but he's optimistic. "Consensus is forming quickly in the industry," he said.

2. 50-Gigabit