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2003 Survivor's Guide to Infrastructure: Page 6 of 22

Enterprise Backbone

By next year, all the major vendors will have 10 Gigabit Ethernet products supporting the IEEE 802.3ae standard, which was approved in June of 2002. Likewise, the vendors that successfully sold you gigabit for the desktop will be talking about how to aggregate all that gigabit bandwidth at the backbone. Do you need 10 Gigabit Ethernet? For most, it's a simple decision: If you need 10 Gigabit at the backbone, you'll know it, and you'll pay for it--one 10-Gigabit port will probably cost tens of thousands of dollars, even if prices drop next year from 2002's prices of $50,000 to $100,000.

This is still an immature market, however, and you need to be wary of vendors that are quite willing to sell you 10-Gigabit ports but that haven't published independent, third-party tests that prove that their boxes can support the bandwidth, especially with ACL (access-control lists) and QoS (Quality of Service) features enabled.