The following is just a few points in regards to FORE beating CSCO in ATM, and startups are taking share in GBit mkt. It is my opinion that csco is just keeping pace because of some acquisitions. This acquisitions strategy is getting much tougher with the new regulation that companies can not do one time charge pooling interest anymore.
In th ehigh-speed router segment, there are about ten startups that have much more powerful switch-routers than csco. Two years ago, most companies left the router mkt for csco and were not interested in competing with CSCO. But, as the mkt grows tremendously because of the Internet, many startups as well as large companies such as LU are coming in with great products. That is why CSCO will face stiff margin pressure going forward. Maintain the call that a year from now csco will be much lower than today.
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data.com
User gets bad to the backbone with
Gigabit Ethernet
By Jeff Caruso
Network World, 12/07/98
Boca Raton, Fla.
It is the ultimate in bursty traffic: more than 100
servers containing tens of thousands of Web sites
doing a daily backup to a storage array.
It used to take up to 16 hours each day for the
process to trickle through the Fast Ethernet pipes at
HiWay Technologies, a Web site hosting firm. With
plans to expand to up to 2,000 servers, the provider
needed something faster.
The company had an idea: build a separate
infrastructure, identical to the existing one, dedicated
to performing daily data backups. This plan would
have required a second network card in every server
to hook into a second Fast Ethernet backbone.
HiWay also considered installing Fibre Channel, but
that also would have required a separate network.
Instead, HiWay decided to replace the Fast Ethernet
backbone network with Gigabit Ethernet and send
backup traffic over the same lines as other data. The
company didn't have to install additional cards in its
servers, and at $120,000, this approach cost
one-third as much as setting up a separate network,
says David Hartman, manager of network systems at
HiWay.
Last June, the company installed a Gigabit Ethernet
backbone anchored by a pair of Foundry Networks'
BigIron 4000 switches. A handful of Foundry
FastIron switches link to the backbone and connect
the servers through their 24 Fast Ethernet ports.
Because these connections don't use Gigabit Ethernet,
HiWay didn't have to upgrade the cards in the
servers.
It now takes four to six hours to back up the
company's 125 servers. That's still too long, Hartman
says, but the bottleneck isn't the network.
The problem is the server that manages backups, a
Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 machine connected to
the backbone via a Gigabit Ethernet card. "We got rid
of the network problem and pushed it to the CPU on
the Origin 2000," Hartman says.
The server moves at a speed of only about 300M
bit/sec, and Hartman is looking for Silicon Graphics to
get that rate increased to about 750M bit/sec by
tweaking the network card and improving the speed
of its server. Hartman's goal is to back up all the
servers in just a couple of hours.
Backups are really the only reason HiWay chose
Gigabit Ethernet. Without the bursts caused by the
high-volume backups, less than 10% of the backbone
is used, Hartman says. Because the company hosts
Web sites, most of the traffic is outbound to the
Internet.
"The traffic in and out of the Internet doesn't warrant
Gigabit Ethernet," Hartman says. At peak times, the
traffic level reaches only about 70M bit/sec through
HiWay's three T-3 lines to ISPs. But installing Gigabit
Ethernet gives the company some headroom for at
least the next three years, Hartman estimates.
Right now, HiWay doesn't use any of the Layer 3
functions of its BigIron switches. But one reason the
company chose Foundry equipment is that it supports
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing. OSPF is a
routing protocol that can adapt quickly to network
changes.
Today, HiWay manually sets up static routes to its
servers via the Cisco 7505 routers it uses to connect
to the Internet. But that will change. Using OSPF, the
servers will be automatically discovered, reducing the
administrative burden of manually defining them,
Hartman says. This will be critical as the company
adds hundreds of new servers.
HiWay also plans to use Virtual Router Redundancy
Protocol, a standard that defines how a backup router
can automatically take over when another router fails.
This way, if HiWay loses one of its two Layer 3
switches, the second can pick up the slack.
But the company hasn't had much trouble with
outages. In fact, of the switches it uses, only one port
on one of the switches has failed.
"That's unbelievable as far as I'm concerned,"
Hartman says. |
