All: Accelar routing switches and BS350s @ Miami Dade's network
Gigabit Goes To Head Of The Class At Miami Dade
Internet Week
January 5, 1998
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Leading Edge
"We definitely wanted to go toward a gigabit backbone" to support a
growing number of 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet connections, says Miguel
Corteguera, enterprise network manager at Miami Dade, one of the
largest community colleges in the country. The school hosts about
80,000 part-time students every semester. The Gigabit Ethernet
backbones on nine campus sites are connected by a metropolitan FDDI
ring.
Although only 5 percent of the 7,000 end stations use Fast Ethernet
now, over the past few months Miami Dade installed network interface
cards and switches that can run either 10-Mbps Ethernet or Fast
Ethernet. In the near future, the college expects to run more of its
11,000 ports at the higher speed.
Routing the high volumes of traffic that could be generated requires
Layer 3 switches, so the college ordered 14 Accelar routing switches
from Bay Networks.
In all, Miami Dade spent about $1 million on the routing switches
and about 50 of Bay's 350T Fast Ethernet switches for its wiring
closets.
"We had been using routers, but the router ports were so expensive,"
says Bill Dickhaus, director of college network services at Miami
Dade. " The Layer 3 switches were half the cost and had more
capacity."
Miami Dade's network may be prototypical of large networks to be
built in 1998. Layer 3 switching is being combined with Gigabit
Ethernet to step up bandwidth from the most common networks of
Ethernet and Fast Ethernet router networks.
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