New Switches Pave Way for 10G LAN Backbones

Many of the companies that added support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet to their enterprise switches in the past year are now readying productions that will increase the 10G port density in their fruits lines.

The development should enable enterprises to more easily link together campuses or buildings on a 10G LAN backbone and to aggregate Gigabit Ethernet traffic, which is increasingly the norm upon LANs. The development should also plain the progress of emerging grid computing technologies and the integration of storage area networks with LANs.

"It uncloses doors that heretofore we did not have render free of access and that's interoperability," said Greg Williamson, associate director of Information and Technology Services at Arkansas State University, in Jonesboro. The gymnasium is building a 10G backbone to aggregate Gigabit Ethernet traffic upon its LAN.

Startup Force10 Networks Inc. is preparing to launch in September its first switch/router for 10G It will provide filled line-rate speeds of 10G bp and will support 28 10G ports in its chassis, said company officials in Milpitas, Calif.

Alcatel SA by the agency of the first quarter of nearest year plans to offer its first single-port 10G module for its novel OmniSwitch 8800 for large enterprises. Officials at the Paris-based company said 10G support is likely to expand nearest year into its OmniSwitch 7000-series switches for medium-size and smaller enterprise networks.

Other vendors looking to expand their single-port 10G support include most remote Networks Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., which will reach out support for 10G beyond its BlackDiamond switches to its Alpine line of core enterprise switches as customer demand increases, officials said. They declined to specify a time frame.

Foundry Networks Inc., which supports 10G upon its BigIron switch family, plans within the nearest year to offer WAN interfaces upon its NetIron Internet router line aimed at service providers, said officials in San Jose Calif.

Cisco a whole s Inc., also of San Jose has plans to provide more 10G ports in subsequent time versions of its Catalyst 6500 enterprise switch and Catalyst 1200 switch for service providers.

And Nortel Networks Corp. is doubling the switch capacity in its Passport 8600 Routing Switch, for which it presents a single-port 10G blade, to handle a larger number of ports for blade, said officials in Santa Clara.

While vendors push for additional 10G support, enterprises are just beginning to consider ways to display the higher bandwidth.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif., for example, this week will demonstrate the use of 10G to race a supercomputing application that simulates the collision of black apertures said Mike Bennett, senior network engineer at the lab.

"I have folk on the outside there in the research community that are ready for the bandwidth," Bennett said. "If I had unlimited resources, I would already be buying it."

Related stories:

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Dell Readies of recent origin Switches; Eyes Layer 3, 10 Gig Arena

10 Gigabits and Beyond

Intel Does the Gigabit Go-Go at N+I

Switch Brings Gigabit Ethernet to Desktop

Commentary: 10G Ethernet: We'll All Use It Someday

Copyright ?© 2002 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserv Originally appearing in The toil Economy.