Atlanta-NAP's choice of switch
Jonathan Heiliger
loco at isi.net
Sun Oct 27 03:12:30 UTC 1996
On Sat, 26 Oct 1996, Darin Wayrynen wrote:
|} Which begs a question: why use a Giga-switch at all?
|}
|} With the head of line blocking feature/problem and scalability only to
|} full duplex 100 mbps is a Gigaswitch something that should be used in a
|} next generation NAP?
Nathan mentioned that MFS has started their new MAEs with a Catalyst or
shared FDDI ring. Perhaps that has something to do with inital demand.
An example of this is MAE-Houston or MAE-LA, neither of which presently
require the bandwidth a Gigaswitch delivers. MFS has been sticking to the
plan of adding hardware and/or capacity based on demand and traffic stats.
I think the Atlanta NAP, while probably a good idea, won't run into the
head of line blocking problem in the extremely near future. Looking at
the growth pattern of other exchange points leads me to believe this.
|} I'm not suggesting it's intended to be the next generation NAP, but
|} you'd think that they would want to use the latest switches and
|} technology available, rather than continue down the FDDI road.
What else would you suggest? Gigabit Ethernet hasn't been standardized
yet, Cisco doesn't make a HIPPI interface, and some people prefer to not
use ATM. FDDI has proven to very reliable, etc. Having ISPs continue to
grow egress bandwidth has shown to be a bigger problem than the switch
fabric at the larger exchange points.
-jh-
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