"You can't get fired for buying Cisco, but
that doesn't mean you're doing justice to
your job,"
Monday, November 16, 1998, 9:15 a.m. ET.
ISP Goes Giga For
Scalability, Performance
By JOHN FONTANA
ISPs are giving Gigabit Ethernet the
acid test in advance of enterprise
deployment.
The lesson for IT managers: If Gigabit
Ethernet can handle millions of users
and billions of packets on a service
provider network, it likely has the
horsepower to fulfill bandwidth
requirements on corporate LANs.
MindSpring Enterprises Inc., one of the
nation's largest ISPs, this week will
reveal that it is standardizing on Gigabit
Ethernet switches from Foundry
Networks, replacing older Cisco and
Bay gear. Other ISPs such as AGIS,
Concentric Networks, Juno Online
Services and Uunet also are
standardizing on Gigabit Ethernet at the
core.
"The ISP central office is starting to look
more like a large campus backbone
than a telco architecture," said Rick
Malone, an analyst at Vertical Systems.
"Using Gigabit Ethernet switches to
handle server farms is evolving as a
standard architecture throughout the
industry."
Other observers agreed that these
deployments can be considered by
enterprise customers as the proving
grounds for the scalability and reliability
of Gigabit Ethernet.
"It is a prelude to what you'll see in the
enterprise," said Lisa Allocca, an analyst
at Renaissance Worldwide Inc. "Service
providers are engaging in issues the
enterprise won't encounter for a couple
of years because of the scalability
issues the providers face."
MindSpring, with a customer base of
455,000 mostly residential users, is
deploying BigIron 8000 Gigabit switches
at its core.
The upgrade will support a growing
Web-hosting business and a user
population that is doubling every five
months. It also will support cable modem
and asymmetric digital subscriber line
(ADSL) services, streaming video and
audio, as well as an explosion of E-mail
and Web traffic.
Port density and pricing is what swayed
the Atlanta-based ISP in Foundry's
direction.
"The 8000 gives us 64 ports of Gigabit
Ethernet in one chassis, while other
boxes don't have near that capacity and
are much more expensive," said
Brandon Ross, MindSpring's director of
network engineering.
BigIron, priced at $2,413 per gigabit
port, has a switching capacity of 256
Gbps and can handle up to 100 million
packets per second. The company
evaluated gear from nearly every
competitive vendor before testing
Foundry and Cabletron's SmartSwitch
Router as replacements for its mixture of
Bay Networks and Cisco equipment and
a variety of hubs.
"You can't get fired for buying Cisco, but
that doesn't mean you're doing justice to
your job," Ross said. "Foundry is still
small enough that when I have a feature
request or a bug report, they are nimble
enough to fix it or add a feature so fast
that it just blows me away."
Foundry isn't so small, however, that it's
a gamble, Ross said. The vendor was
one of the first to market with Gigabit
Ethernet and has more than 400
accounts.
Another ISP banking on Gigabit Ethernet
is Juno. The company is nearly halfway
through implementing Gigabit Ethernet,
according to vice president Alex
Sarafian. He said the company
standardized on a switch from a smaller
vendor that he declined to name.
"We don't play with bleeding-edge
technology," Sarafian said. "We are
concerned with reliability and
performance. I think other companies
could look to us and know they can roll
this stuff out on a smaller network."
That is especially true for networks that
must grow in order to keep an enterprise
competitive.
"Previous to this type of equipment,
we've had to swap out the hardware on
our LAN server farm once every three
months to keep up with traffic," said
MindSpring's Ross. "With the Foundry
gear, other than adding more ports for
more servers, I don't think I'll have to
touch it for at least six months and
probably closer to a year," he said,
adding that his core Foundry switch
handles more than 2 billion packets per
day.
A BigIron 8000 switch sits in
MindSpring's new Phoenix call center.
The site has two eight-slot chassis
running 192 10/100-Mbps Ethernet ports
and 16 ports of Gigabit Ethernet. It will
eventually handle between 500 and 600
technical support workstations on a full
Gigabit Ethernet backbone.
In Atlanta, the rollout is under way with
one 8000 with 64 ports all running at
1,000 Mbps. The site houses the
company's production server LAN, which
includes nearly 90 Digital Alpha servers
and Network Appliance filers as its disk
farm. Those servers support e-mail,
Web access and hosting, 200,000
newsgroups and FTP.
"It's almost all flat Layer 2 switching that
needs to be done at very high speed,"
Ross said. All the servers eventually will
migrate to Gigabit Ethernet, as will
MindSpring's Cisco 7513 and Bay BCN
routers. The company also plans to
update its 375 points of presence from
10 Mbps Ethernet to gigabit speeds
once it deploys cable modem and ADSL
services, which may come as early as
the second half of next year.
A Gigabit Ethernet backbone, operating
at Layer 3, also will be core to
MindSpring's corporate network, which
supports workstations, technical support,
customer service, sales and
engineering.
"The work we are doing on our internal
LAN equates to any enterprise," Ross
said. "The only difference is that we have
even more of a demand for network
services than your typical enterprise
might.
Ross will deploy identical systems in the
Phoenix and Harrisburg, Pa., call
centers. Similarly, the server farms in
Atlanta and Seattle will mirror each
other. MindSpring acquired the Seattle
operation from SpryNet in September.
"All of this bandwidth certainly makes it
easier to grow," he said. |
