The all-fiber corporate backbone in Allentown, which includes 12,000 nodes and 5,500 users, supports much of the company's R&D operations, so bandwidth and flexibility are everything. Air Products' backup servers--Storage Technology Corp. systems with a large Silicon Graphics front end--have multiple 100-Mbps and gigabit adapters and are directly attached to the Layer 3 switches, Extreme Networks' BlackDiamonds. "One of our big drivers for bandwidth was that we just didn't have enough bandwidth to back up all of our 600 servers on the LAN," Priester says. "And we configure the Layer 3 switches as lean, mean gigabit routing machines to support our end stations."

That fits in with Air Products' strategy to consolidate and centralize its applications. "For that you need big pipes," Priester says. The company's LAN core switches then hand off traffic both to its MAN (metropolitan area network), which supports off-campus sites including R&D and manufacturing operations, and to its frame relay WAN.

Air Products' former network didn't have wire-speed switching at the edge, which made it difficult to back up its servers and provide redundancy. Still, like most organizations, the company is nowhere near tapping the gigabit pipe's potential: Air Products uses about 10 percent to 15 percent of the pipe thus far, according to Priester.

The company also plans to extend Layer 3 switching to its process-control applications, such as air-handling systems for air conditioning and other types of air flow, power and even video-based monitoring of its control-system stations. "Devices that do air-handling in some of our R&D labs can be complex. So it's possible to control the systems across the network rather than monitoring them out of band," Priester says. Security and surveillance also could be done via gigabit, rather than having guards posted at the door, he says. "We have the network capacity to do that," he adds.

That's where QoS (Quality of Service) will come in. Air Products is exploring how to take data from its building monitor/control/alarm systems--now on the LAN--and push that data among the campus buildings, too. "The idea of offering LAN backbone service to these building monitors is to expand access to the data," Priester says.