Dear CalREN-2 Participant,

UCSB's CalREN-2 committee was formed to design the on-campus implementation
of the CalREN-2 network which is to provide the functionality specified in
the proposal, namely ATM Switches, IP data transport service, and Quality
of Service. We have analyzed the bandwidth and quality of service
requirements for those research groups applications and we are
investigating a new ATM-based campus backbone to provide the needed
functionality.  We researched the current ATM standards and developed a
list of those standards that were required to provide QoS functionality,
e.g., UNI 4.0 Signalling, MPOA, LANEv2, and PNNI.  We validated our list
with the Gartner Group and we have sent out an RFI to Cisco, Fore,
Cabletron, Newbridge, Xylan, IBM, NEC, 3Com, Lucent/Agile Networks, and
Alcatel Data/Network Systems to determine which vendors support which
standards. 

Our investigations so far indicate that no vendor is fully supporting the
needed standards.  At best, a single-vendor proprietary solution may
provide support across our campus, but of course that does not address the
end-to-end issues which is stipulated in the CalREN-2 proposal.  At this
point it looks like there will have to be hardware and software evolution
before equipment exists that can provide the end-to-end capability needed,
so it doesn't seem prudent to spend a lot of money on equipment right now. 
Moreover, it is difficult to make predictions and design the campus piece
of a larger network, given very little information about that larger
network.  One option we are considering is purchasing inexpensive equipment
to provide more bandwidth for our campus backbone, and then address the
Quality of Service requirements once standards based functionality is
available. 

Since it is unlikely that we are the only campus in this predicament,
we would ask you to briefly respond to the following:

1. Do you agree with our conclusions regarding the state of the
technology?

2. If you have Quality of Service requirements for your applications,
how are you planning to solve them?

3. How are you planning to provide CalREN-2 functionality on your
campus? (what options are you considering?)

Thank you for your help and any information that you have on your
implementation for CalREN-2.  We have created a mailing list
ucatm-tech@ucsb.edu to foster this sort of discussion.  If you are
interested, you can subscribe to ucatm-tech-request@ucsb.edu

Sincerely,

Elise Meyer
UCSB CalREN-2 Implementation Group Chair

Kevin Barron
UCSB CalREN-2 Applications Rep