FORE being taken into Stratosphere. ATM is going great, FORE should do really well this qtr and for next year as they now has both great GBit as well as ATM products. all imo.
The price seems to be treading up and most tax lost selling were pretty much done. Look for FORE to start showing the Jan effect earlier on in December. If one waits fro Jan, will probably be too late. IMO, in Jan FORE should be at least 25$.
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November 30, 1998, Issue: 743
Section: News & Analysis
ATM Takes NOAA Into Stratosphere
John Fontana
Boulder, Colo. - Think government agencies are slow and bureaucratic? The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is about to blow that
stereotype out of the water.
The NOAA is set to flip the switch on a high-performance ATM network next
month. The network is at the heart of a new facility that will open in January
and support 11 organizations studying everything from the ozone layer to El
Nino.
What the NOAA designed was a flexible, resilient ATM network that has the
capacity to grow to OC-48 (2 Gbps) and beyond. Every office in its $55.7
million dollar facility here has two pairs each of fiber and Category 5 cabling.
The $3.5 million, 2,400-node network has some 80 to 90 VLANs supporting
the internal data generated by 98 laboratories and their external Web sites.
The architecture allows each lab to operate as a separate segment of the
network with its own administrators and policies.
"We are a research organization. You can't model us like a bank; things [here]
change very fast," according to Britt Bassett, network manager at the
NOAA's Boulder labs. "The network we built allows us to easily add
bandwidth in specific segments, to allocate bandwidth for individual needs and
support distributed management."
Those features allow the NOAA to dedicate bandwidth to satellite and other
real-time feeds, and support a massively parallel processing computer that
weather researchers at the Forecast Systems Lab use to gather and store
data.
The NOAA's network is star-wired with four ForeRunner ASX-1000 ATM
switches from Fore Systems Inc. and interconnected with OC-12 links at its
core, known as the Main Distribution Facility. There are 25 Intermediate
Distribution Facilities (IDFs) and six computer rooms. Ten of the IDFs house
an ASX-1000 with dual ATM fabrics that are connected with dual OC-12
links to the core switches. Both links are utilized while available, and PNNI
keeps the network up and running in the event of equipment or link failure.
The 10 IDF switches provide OC-3 ATM ports to nearly 10 percent of
NOAA's desktops.
The other desktops are supported with 10/100 Ethernet using 70 Fore
ES-3810 LAN switches. Each switch is connected via dual OC-3 lines to two
separate ATM fabrics on an ASX-1000. Network services such as LAN
Emulation, MPOA and inter-VLAN routing are supported by eight Fore
ASN-9000s that are connected to the IDF switches via dual OC-3 lines.
The NOAA needed the flexible architecture because it is a collection of
disparate organizations.
It also is tapping Multiprotocol Over ATM, which the new facility will roll out
in the first half of next year. MPOA eliminates the only potential network
bottleneck, the ASN-9000 routers, according to network engineer Alex Hsia.
The NOAA chose ATM over Gigabit Ethernet because the latter was not fully
developed when the bidding for the government contract opened in early part
of 1997.
"At some point we might deploy Gigabit Ethernet at the edge, but not in the
core," said Jerry Janssen, electronics engineer at the NOAA. "Gigabit
Ethernet doesn't have the resiliency and flexibility of ATM or the ability to
support voice and video."
Copyright ® 1998 CMP Media Inc. |
