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Premium Network, Four Ways
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March 21, 2003
By Peter Morrissey
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Foundry Networks
Foundry, which came in a close second in our recent review of 10 Gigabit switches, (see "Life in the Really Fast Lane," at ) was able to provide everything C2G required, including standards-based 10 Gigabit interfaces that have been shipping for months. Foundry also provided the most redundancy, offering dual-redundant, gigabit-fiber connections to two different core routers based on 802.3ad (link aggregation) and VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol) standards. Although Foundry's scenario does have some proprietary elements, we were impressed by the fact that it pushes mostly standards-based solutions.
Although Foundry does not have support for PoE built into its switches, it has partnered with a leading external power vendor, PowerDsine, and provided us with a very long list of compatible VoIP phones and access points. PowerDsine is active in the 802.3af committee and also indicated support for the current revision of the standard. As we pointed out, there are disadvantages to providing PoE externally, so we're glad Foundry has partnered with a respected vendor.
Foundry not only responded to all four variations of our wiring-closet scenarios, it was the only vendor to give us both a chassis-based and a stackable solution for each. The stackables were the least expensive, at $399,880 for 100 Mbps at the edge, to a whopping $1,194,265 for gigabit chassis-based gear with PoE. Although this was the highest of all the chassis-based quotes, it included totally redundant equipment at the core, which accounts for the difference. In general, we found that making the jump from powered to nonpowered hubs was insignificant compared with the increase from 100 Mbps to gigabit in the closet: Even sticking with Foundry's stackables, the cost increased by more than 60 percent. This might be hard to justify with a tight budget, but it's arguably dirt cheap for a magnitude higher of bandwidth. The real question is, will C2G's desktop applications need even 100 Mbps of bandwidth over the next four to five years? For an insurance company it isn't likely, unless the company decides to start transmitting high-quality video to desktops. If that happens, it will have to add 10 Gigabit uplinks from the closet as well. If stackables are used, it may be difficult or impossible to provide this option.
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Foundry's chassis-based proposal was pricey--the 100-Mbps setup cost about the same as its stackable gigabit solution. Foundry pointed out a number of advantages of the chassis design, however. First, greater redundancy: It's possible to have two management modules in a chassis along with redundant power supplies and fans. It's also possible to provide 10 Gigabit aggregation within the building and to add more desktop ports if necessary. In addition, more of the network could be aggregated on the switch backplane. There are also TCO (total cost of ownership) benefits because we could use the same chassis for every piece of the network. This simplifies training and makes swapping boxes easier and less expensive in that C2G would have fewer spares to purchase and track. While this all appeals to our network manager side, we're not sure the ROI could be justified for such a high price.
We liked that Foundry's management application uses a Sybase database, making the data easier to extract if necessary. We were also intrigued by Foundry's support, in its equipment as well as in its network-management software, of the new sFlow standard, (RFC 3176, which provides for network-traffic monitoring and accountability technology in switches and routers; see www.inmon.com/PDF/sFlowOverview.pdf and www.sflow.org/rfc3176.txt for more details). This could give us a way to leverage applications from other vendors that could provide troubleshooting and reporting information on individual high-speed interfaces otherwise difficult to gather. All the management applications were accessible from the Web and didn't require client installs.
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