Attendees:
Kevin Barron,
Steve Francis,
Elise Meyer,
Larry Murdock,
Jason Simpson, and
Mark Schildhauer
Unable to Attend:
Nathan Freitas,
Ben Humphrey,
Jim Frew,
Roger Lenard,
Stephen Pope,
Rich Prohaska,
Kevin Schmidt,
Vince Sefcik,
Rob Bootsma, and
Ed Mehlschau
Which vendors can supply FSBs
The group is moving in the direction of an FSB solution, i.e., selecting
equipment that has the flexibility to do multiple networking technologies &150;
for example, ATM, Fast Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet &150; versus equipment that is only able to do ATM.
Kevin Barron reported that Fore doesn't have any plans to implement Gigabit
Ethernet on the ASX-1000, although they might on the Powerhub 8000 which can
do 1 million pps switching and 300,000 pps routing. Elise noted that Bay
Networks doesn't have either OC-12 ATM or Gigabit ethernet on their current
offerings. That leaves Cabletron, Cisco, IBM, and Xylan as current contenders.
Regarding Cisco: Commgw can only do 50,000 pps. Their Catalyst family can
currently do 255,000 pps via RSM, but in April they will be able to do wire
speed after the first packet via Netflow and get up to multi-million pps
switching. The IBM offering is strong in routing and switching (which is ATM
based), but they don't currently have a frame infrastructure to support Fast
Ethernet.
The requirements for an FSB are:
- The vendor must be shipping the following capabilities by February 1, 1998:
- OC-12 ATM
- OC-3 ATM
- 100BaseFX
- Routing speeds of 250,000 pps
- The vendor must have future plans to provide:
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Routing speeds of multi-million pps
- The ATM features that we want are:
Decide Now or Wait Another Quarter?
The latest word on the start date of the inter-campus network was that CENIC-TPG
would begin to put it together on March 1, so bits might not actually be flowing
to UCSB until May 1.
Mark pointed out that since many of the vendors were claiming that they would
have equipment that would satisfy our requirements by March '98 or June '98,
wouldn't it be better to wait to make an equipment decision until they come
out with new product. It was noted that all we would need at a minimum to
attach to the CalREN-2 network would be an OC-3 connection between the CENIC
ATM switch and commgw. The research groups and the rest of campus would be
able to access the new offcampus bandwidth of 622Mb/s over the shared 100Mb/s
FDDI backbone. We could wait until the network traffic approached or maxed out
our current resources before putting in new resources. There was a very
heated discussion about the benefit of waiting vs. the benefit of putting in
a solution ahead of a problem. The group decided that we did want to continue
to aim for implementing a solution to meet the inter-campus network deadline.
So we want to come to a decision by February 1.
Caltrans
We didn't discuss new terms for a Caltrans deal, but we did discuss updating
Caltrans on the direction we are heading via FSBs.
Action Items for Next Meeting: January 9, 1998
- Everyone should analyze the RFI responses of Cabletron, Cisco,
IBM and Xylan since they are the only companies that can supply
FSB's.
- Elise will update Caltrans on our direction.
- Elise will rewrite the Fiber request document so that it can
be submitted to the CNC via the BEG as a networking funding request.
Back to Main CalREN-2 Page
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