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To: J Fieb who wrote (1763)	1/29/2000 3:52:00 PM
From: J Fieb	Respond to of 4808

Gig Ethernet Reaches Across WAN (01/28/00, 11:18 a.m. ET) By Chuck Moozakis, InternetWeek In a bid to woo enterprises with bandwidth-intensive Internet access demands, Exodus Communications has rolled out a data service based on Gigabit Ethernet. Gig E, available in California and set to be rolled out nationwide in February, lets Exodus transmit data 10 times faster than the 100 megabit per second service it previously offered, said Scott Emo, Exodus's director of product marketing. Gig E is based on BigIron 8000 switches from Foundry Networks. The switches -- installed at Exodus's Internet data centers -- funnel Gig E traffic directly from customers' servers co-located at the centers onto Exodus's backbone. Mark Ryan, chief technical officer at Weather.com, said he plans to tap Gig E to help support ever-increasing traffic demands. "Visits to our site can double or triple in a heartbeat, depending upon the weather," Ryan said. "And a supplier of, say, outerwear that's advertising in a cold weather region would also be hit heavy, so this service will help us get a better handle on that traffic as well." He said he expects to begin using Gig E later this quarter. Emo said Gig E will replace Exodus' former approach to handling customers' traffic spikes -- in which disparate 100-Mbit/s pipes would be stitched together to handle overflows. Gig E, capable of moving up to 96 million packets per second, will let Exodus eliminate that approach, Emo said. "For a large traffic site, this service is compelling," said Giga Information Group analyst Joel Yaffe. "You get the throughput and you don't have to deal with the headaches associated with administering your own Gigabit Ethernet hardware and software." Gig E is priced with a setup fee of $5,000, plus a monthly recurring charge based on how often high-bandwidth content is distributed. GlobalCenter, the Web hosting arm of Global Crossing, also offers a Gigabit Ethernet service. While not a specific service, the carrier has been providing 1,000-Mbit/s throughput to customers since last October, a spokesman said.

To: J Fieb who wrote (1763)	1/30/2000 3:19:00 PM
From: buck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

"As the availability of dark fiber grows, new OEMs are selling dark-fiber access systems to carriers that reside within the corporate environment. Newcomers like Quantum Bridge and Luxn offer special optical access equipment to carriers, often with LAN- and SAN-only interfaces like Ethernet and Fibre Channel. This lets carriers manage Fibre Channel server farms, once seen as solely the domain of enterprise data managers" Dark Fiber is fiber optic cable that exists from point A to point B, but has no tariffed traffic over it. It is typically found in metropolitan areas, and utilized in metropolitan area networks. It is sold at a higher price than ATM, GigE, ESCON, or other tariffed protocols. The buyer can use it for whatever they want, like SONET or GigE, or weird home-grown protocols. Optical access equipment, to me, means attachment to the dark fiber. It could be DWDM-type of equipment that allows you to run GigE, FC, and ATM over one fiber pair, to solve two or three enterprise-level problems. I disagree that dark fiber should be LAN- or SAN-only. If you have a good DWDM interface, it should carry whatever you want at the wave-length (??? color-band?) you want. This is a very specialized niche, that has lots of potential for end-users who have several large, enterprise-class, locations in one metropolitan area. To me, those are decreasing in number as localization decreases and bandwidth gets cheaper. It costs a lot less to build in Cleburne, TX than it does in downtown Dallas. What someone somewhere has to decide is if the cheap&huge bandwidth is gonna get to their site soon enough. On the other hand, I absolutely love the idea of FC server farms.