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To: HammerHead who wrote (11800)	1/27/1998 9:30:00 PM
From: Mark Ambrose	Respond to of 77400

What, exactly, is a "routing switch?" By Jonathan Marshall, Chronicle Staff Writer Thanks for that link, that led to this one: sfgate.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- What, exactly, is a "routing switch?" By Jonathan Marshall, Chronicle Staff Writer Routing switches, also known as Layer 3 switches, operate behind the scenes in corporate networks, much like regional sorting centers at the post office. Think of a computer network, say one serving a company's personnel or accounting department, as a community of computers. Data are delivered in ""packets'' to individual computers in the network by devices called switches or hubs, much as local post offices deliver letters to individual homes in the neighborhood. Data packets get passed between departments, from network to network, through devices called routers. In the same way, letters often pass between post offices through regional sorting centers. Routers come with sophisticated software to handle many different kinds of data formats, just as a sorting center deals with many shapes and sizes of packages and letters, as well as different languages and address formats. Now suppose everyone sending mail standardized on a single kind of business letter and address format. A postal center could become much more efficient by installing automatic sorting machines to replace intelligent human sorters. That's exactly what routing switches do. They take advantage of the fact that more and more business networks are now using the same data format standard used on the Internet. They replace intelligent but slow software with ultrafast integrated circuits to route data packets. Best of all, they work just like regular routers, so they don't require any redesign of the network. ""It's a no-brainer,'' said Jeremy Duke, director of research at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz. ""It gives you an instantaneous increase in performance. Just plug it in and it rips.''