Frame Relay Holds Its Own Over
ATM
(07/06/98; 1:38 p.m. ET)
By John T. Mulqueen, InternetWeek
Two banks on opposite coasts and competing in
different financial markets share one view as they
overhaul their networks: ATM is not yet up to snuff.
San Francisco-based California Federal Bank (Cal
Fed) and Sumitomo Bank Capital Markets in New
York are each engaged in LAN and WAN projects
that rely heavily on frame relay.
Cal Fed, which is replacing a point-to-point systems
network architecture (SNA) network with frame relay,
is considering ATM, but only in the distant future.
"We are looking at ATM for the future, but the major
carriers are not ready for prime time" with the required
infrastructure -- namely, written procedures,
documentation, and ongoing testing to compete with
frame relay, said Thomas Nanomantube, Cal Fed's
senior vice president of information and technology
services.
Sumitomo has a frame relay network from Concert
Communications that connects its New York office to
branches in London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.
Someday, that network will migrate to ATM, but not
soon.
"Public ATM networks are still in their infancy and
remind me of where frame relay was five years ago,"
said Rob McKenna, vice president of global network
engineering at Sumitomo. "There is no quality of service,
and you don't know what the response time and
reliability is. Big carriers have the services, but they are
more like pilots."
Voice calls have become so inexpensive that it is not
economical to put in an ATM network just so voice can
be combined with data, he said. And the standards for
handling voice over ATM are not set, he added.
"Ideally, once ATM matures and they get some
compression and work out something to [support]
voice more cost effectively, then we will see a seamless
LAN to ATM to WAN and back," McKenna said.
Cal Fed is migrating from SNA to frame relay to
increase communication links to branch offices and to
ease the acquisition of Glendale Federal Bank. Two
Glendale data centers are being consolidated into Cal
Fed's data center in Sacramento at a $30 million annual
savings, Nanomantube said.
The network upgrade will increase response time to
branches, lay the infrastructure for handling more
acquisitions, make it possible to roll out Internet
services for customers, and create a foundation for an
intranet.
Within some 400 branches, Cal Fed is replacing token
ring LANs with Ethernet networks running off Cisco
10/100 Catalyst 2924 switches. WAN connections will
be through Cisco 2524 routers. MCI is supplying
56-kilobit-per-second frame relay links to the branches
and T1 or T3 lines into data centers.
"The network was not meeting
our business requirements
because of response delays to
the branches," said
Nanomantube. "We wanted to
[Web-enable] the branches
and allow them to do that
without impacting response
times."
In addition, the network
connects its headquarters in
San Francisco to loan and
mortgage offices in Maryland
and Texas. The network will
have 400 routers and 600
switches in the branch offices,
and 20 additional routers and
about 100 switches in other
offices around the country.
Most of the bank's traffic is from typical financial
transactions such as credit verifications. ATM machines
are on the LANs, but have their own WAN
connections. Nanomantube said ATM traffic will be
wrapped in Synchronous Data Link Control protocol
and shipped across the WAN in IP packets. Legacy
SNA traffic will run under Novell's Internetwork Packet
Exchange protocol in an IP packet on the frame relay
network.
Nanomantube is on a tight schedule. In any given week,
20 to 30 branches are being cut over; all 400 are
supposed to be completed by early next year.
Cal Fed will roll out Internet banking services next year.
That may include processing of auto loans and
consumer mortgages. The website today is used for
informational purposes only. "We have got the frame
relay network now and can move [ahead],"
Nanomantube said.
In New York, Sumitomo's overhaul will build the
network infrastructure for the next three to five years
and let network managers tailor bandwidth to the most
important application and business needs, said
McKenna.
Sumitomo is installing 3Com SuperStack II Switch
1100s as well as 3300s and 3500s that connect to
3Com CoreBuilder 5000s. The bank has 18 of the
5000s, but is replacing some of them with 30 of the less
expensive stackable switches, McKenna said.
The switches also replace costly Cisco 7000 routers,
which will be moved to the network edge to handle
frame relay connections. The 7000 is an old router, and
newer models would have cost twice as much as the
stackable switches, McKenna said.
Still, he will use new smaller Cisco routers -- probably
4500s -- for the frame relay WAN connections
because they are more robust than 3Com's, he said.
"We are looking at ordering CoreBuilder 9000s later
this year for more port density," he said. "We will
probably get two of those and put them in the first
quarter of 1999."
McKenna said the stackable switches are
802.1pq-compliant and will lay the foundation for
intelligent network and quality-of-service guarantees.
"We will be able to tailor our traffic flow to applications
that are most important to the business, and, ultimately,
flagging priority traffic," he said. |
