"The way we arrived at our network configuration was all about bandwidth," says Gian Zoppo, IS director for the Long Beach, Calif.-based design firm. One of the largest independent integrated-design firms in the United States, The Designory's high-profile work includes brochures for luxury automakers Porsche and Mercedes, merchandising for Home Savings of America, and Web work for AMP Research's bikes.

The Designory's files are big--some digital images can be as large as 1 GB. With the company's old 10-Mbps shared Ethernet backbone, it could take up to 30 minutes for digital artists to save their massive files. "Users would tend to hold back and not save as often," Zoppo says. "If their workstations crashed, they would lose their work."

The new Gigabit Ethernet backbone, which consists of three Bay Networks Accelar 1200 Layer 3 switches as well as full-duplex, 100-Mbps Ethernet links from the desktop to the backbone, has shaved those file-save times from a half hour to a few minutes or even seconds. Today, artists and designers working on high-end Apple PowerMac 9600s get continuous file transfers of about 6.5 MB per second to the server on average, Zoppo says.

He says The Designory considered ATM as well as other local high-speed connections such as HPPI (High-Performance Parallel Interface) and Fibre Channel for its backbone, but Gigabit Ethernet was less expensive and required no retraining of the network staff. And The Designory's main operations are all within a single building, so Gigabit Ethernet's physical distance limitations weren't an issue. "We didn't want to redesign our network--Ethernet was something we were familiar with," Zoppo says.

Meanwhile, there is a noticeable kludge in the Gigabit Ethernet network: the size of the desktop and server machines' data paths. "Even with a gigabit NIC, once you hit the bus, you can only move so much data across that bus to memory or to I/O," says Zoppo. The ideal bus size for The Designory's workstations and server is 64 bits or higher, with OSes and applications capable of taking advantage of it, he says.

And The Designory is still awaiting a native Gigabit Ethernet NIC for its Silicon Graphics Origin2000 server; Zoppo expects to have the gigabit connection to the server up and running this summer. That would replace the 100-Mbps server connection and let the firm begin bringing gigabit down to the desktop. "Achieving gigabit to the desktop is going to allow us to help define the design process in the next millennium," Zoppo says.