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  RFP: Gigabit Ethernet Networks May 3, 1999
To get a sense of the Gigabit Ethernet upgrade solutions vendors offer, we put out an RFP for a fictitious publishing company called MediaMagik, which aims to upgrade its existing backbone network. MediaMagik has experimented with FDDI, Fast Ethernet and ATM in the core of its backbone, but now hopes to move from a routed 100-Mbps backbone with 10-Mbps switched desktop connections to a switched and routed Gigabit Ethernet with 100-Mbps desktop connections. We modeled MediaMagik's backbone infrastructure after a real-world scenario at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Like many businesses, MediaMagik must integrate several different technologies and build a backbone that will last three to five years. MediaMagik's business relies upon its high-speed data backbone to shuffle multiple gigabytes of data each day. As a publisher of CD-ROMs, DVDs and interactive media, MediaMagik relies upon its backbone network 24x7 to get the job done. To minimize the impact of the new network backbone design, we asked vendors to maintain MediaMagik's existing logical IP network design by using VLANs (virtual LANs) and Layer 3 switching. Each vendor also was required to provide a 2-Gbps full-duplex backbone network with switched 10/ 100 to every desktop.
MediaMagik's campus network consists of four identically configured buildings with four floors. Each floor has 192 users. Each building has a production server, and each floor has eight fiber drops to the basement of the building. The campus' data center is located in the basement of the central building (see "MediaMagik's Data Center Configuration" and "MediaMagik's Campus Building," below). In addition to the infrastructure for that building, the data center also houses a high-capacity storage server and a large tape-backup storage system. MediaMagik's backbone uses TCP/IP as its primary transport protocol. Legacy IPX and AppleTalk traffic have been minimized, and MediaMagik expects all legacy traffic to be switched across the entire campus. Each floor of MediaMagik's business is a logical IP subnet. The master production server in the data center and the backup server also share a single IP subnet. MediaMagik also wants to minimize the impact of the Gigabit Ethernet migration, so it wants the new network to support the existing logical configuration. Eleven vendors responded to MediaMagik's RFP. Cisco Systems, Compaq Computer Corp., Extreme Networks, FORE Systems, Foundry Networks, Hewlett-Packard Co., Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks, Olicom, 3Com Corp. and Xylan Corp. turned in widely diverse solutions that all met the core needs of MediaMagik's campus backbone upgrade. Prices for the solutions ranged from $1.2 million to almost $3 million. We scrutinized each vendor's solution to ensure it met MediaMagik's backbone networking needs. Scalability and fault tolerance at the core of the network were central to our evaluation, but total cost of ownership also played an important role. Use this RFP as a guide to creating your short list: Examining each vendor's solution will give you insight into how to build a Gigabit Ethernet backbone. In the end, Network Computing gave HP's proposal the bid. It exceeds all of the requirements for MediaMagik's network, includes extensive product support and does so with a price tag that beats many of the competitors' offerings.
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