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Technology Stocks : MRV Communications (MRVC) opinions? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ronald D. Stange who wrote (8864)	6/2/1998 1:37:00 AM
From: Eric L.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42804

PCWEEK of interest... How much bandwidth do you really need? NGN technologies answer call in distributed environments By Pankaj Chowdhry, PC Week Labs 05.05.98 How much bandwidth is enough? with the advent of Gigabit Ethernet and switched 100M bps on the desktop, this question is ringing in IS managers' ears. The answer may be that we will never know. New applications with voracious appetites for bandwidth are announced every week, and although they may not be here tomorrow, they are definitely on the horizon. One much-ballyhooed concept is convergence--the merging of voice, data and video. Great strides have been made in uniting voice and data, with networking vendors such as 3Com Corp., Bay Networks Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. offering products that meld the two. Video, however, is another story. An order of magnitude increase from today's speeds is necessary to support video on the enterprise backbone. Along with this speed increase, switches must get even smarter to regulate the traffic. Fast Gigabit The Gigabit Ethernet standard isn't even finished, but vendors are already working on Fast Gigabit, which operates at 10G bps. Packet Engines Inc. says that its PE4884 is 10G-bit-ready, and other vendors are following suit. Fast Gigabit will be used initially as an interconnect between Gigabit switches, aiming to remove distance as a factor in the enterprise campus. With Fast Gigabit connecting all switches between buildings on a campus, all clients have full access to any resource, regardless of where they are. Extreme Networks Inc. will debut at NetWorld+Interop this week Gigabit Ethernet running over 100 kilometers of fiber-optic cable. This sort of innovation will rapidly bring Gigabit Ethernet into the MAN. Distributed applications Clustered and distributed applications are also pushing the need for bandwidth. Applications such as Oracle Corp.'s Parallel Server and IBM's DB2 can already take advantage of performance clustering. Unfortunately, the link connecting the cluster is usually a bottleneck both in bandwidth and latency. The up-and-coming VIA (Virtual Interface Architecture) looks to solve this cluster interconnect problem with a 1GB link between servers. The VIA link has a very low transaction latency, which makes it a natural for online transaction processing applications. These servers will probably be connected to a storage area network through a Fibre Channel connection running multiple loops at 1G bps each. Inside the box or out At some point, the bandwidth expansion across the network will hit the inside of the servers. PC Week Labs is getting a glimpse of this with the new 100MHz buses on new Intel-based servers. A quick follow-on will be an upgraded PCI bus running at 64 bps and 66MHz. This will take the 1G-bps PCI bus to 4G bps. However, the most nagging bottleneck at the server is the operating system. Vendors such as Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are planning to alleviate these concerns in their upcoming products zdnet.com also folks here not involved in networking (like me) who'd like to keep up on the future before it happens should check out the whole pcweek report starting w/: zdnet.com Your eyes won't actually glaze over & the critical importance of layer 3 becomes more apparent.... later