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Technology Stocks : YURI ( YURI SYSTEM ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: riposte who wrote (282)	12/20/1997 1:26:00 AM
From: Dave Stevens	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1181

Steve et al, I've been watching the ATM vs Ethernet vs Gigabit debate here for a while and will add a couple of comments that hopefully will help to clear up the use for each. In campus LANs, 10/100 Mb Ethernet will dominate the desktop. It's $65 for a NIC, comes standard in many PCs, is directly supported by major operating systems like Win95 and NT, and is painless to maintain. The electronics in the closets (i.e. Ethernet switches) are currently $250/port for 10/100Mb, $75/port for 10Mb and dropping fast. A comparable ATM NIC is well over $500 and the OC-3 port is somewhere in the $1000 neighborhood. Installation and maintenance are a nightmare and operating system support is nil. There are few if any applications that are aware they are running over ATM and hence, do very little to take advantage of the much touted QoS features of ATM. There is really not much to justify running ATM to the desktop and the previous post that said ATM to the desktop is dead is right on the money. In the campus data center, the question is tricker. One option is a mesh of ATM switches, running ATM between the switches and up to the wiring closets, and then converting from ATM to Ethernet (or Token Ring) in the closet. You still run Ethernet to the desktop but ATM in the risers and backbone. The advantages are the ability to run multiple active trunks to each closet, very good redundancy, a future with QoS built in (when someone gets around to it) and very easy integration with boxes like Yurie for WAN access (assuming you're running ATM in the WAN). There is also good support for Token Ring to the desktop so a nice migration story there for people with installed Token Ring that need a performance boost. The disadvantages are cost (maybe 30% higher than an equivalent 10/100/1000 Mb Ethernet solution) and complexity. Many customers do not have the operational staff to run a complex ATM network, do not have the necessary debugging tools, and are genuinely scared of the technology. The other option is the new 10/100/1000Mb Ethernet switches coming out of all of the major networking vendors and lots of startups. Here you run a mesh of switches with either 100 or 1000Mb up the risers and between switches, 10/100 Mb to the desktop, and 100/1000 Mb to the servers. A layer 3 capable 100Mb port here is well under $1000 and will drop fast. The advantages are perceived simplicity (10/100/1000Mb everywhere, same frames just a speed change), cost (built into silicon and getting cheaper fast), known debugging methods, and an operational staff that feels more comfortable with the technology. WAN integration is much tougher, voice/video/data integration is not clean, and the GE standards are pretty new. There is also of course the traditional option of 10Mb risers connected to routers and an FDDI backbone but this is really a dead end (sorry all you cisco fans ...) and tremendously expensive. My experience is that customers are religious about which technology they use in the campus and both scenarios (the one constant being 10/100 to the desktop) will be around in varying amounts for a long time. The WAN is predominantly frame relay and going to a mix of ATM and packet over sonet with ATM being the big winner in publicly tariffed nets. Packet over sonet is great if are running point to point and don't plan on reprovisioning circuits (i.e. adding new lines/users) very frequently.. Sorry for the rambling note, hope it helps, and comments obviously welcome. Dave