FDDI or 100Mb Ethernet

Sean M. Doran smd at clock.org
Sun Feb 8 22:15:49 UTC 1998


| > SM FDDI -> SM POS.  Problem solved.  Reuse your fibre, even.
|
| *cough*  Um, hate to have to raise an ugly bugaboo, but reusing
| the fibre isn't the problem; it's redesigning the whole network
| architecture from multidrop, ring based FDDI, to point-to-point
| POS connections.

Multipoint?  Ha!  Your architecture should be around an
FDDI switch anyway, then all you do is unplug all the SM
(or MM if that suits you) from the switch(es) and plug
them into your wonderful Cisco 12012 populated with
OC3 cards.   If you really want it to look like LANnish
still, run MPLS.

| Or are you going to point out a cheap (~$100,000) SONET switch
| that will work as a relatively "drop-in" replacement for already
| installed DEC Gigaswitches?  If you know of one

120xx.

You really don't want to put too many 155-size interfaces
into a 75xx router anyway thanks to the fun backplane (so
you are limited in potential choices anyway), but you
probably want two POS cards, one to 12012 "A" and one to
12012 "B".  Traffic managment will be fun, but hey, you
are wizardly at multihoming and stuff already, right?  So
that should be easy-peasy by comparison.

| I'll order a half dozen.  Otherwise, there really isn't any 
| multi-drop replacement for FDDI at this point.

Hm, go back and look at the POP design I postulated the
other day.  Note that MPLS can run over many media, if you
really want things to look like a single level two fabric...

       Sean. ("It's kinda like ATM done mostly right")



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