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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Atlanta-NAP's choice of switch
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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