Network managers are constantly wrestling with the problem of deploying bandwidth-intensive applications over their local area networks (LANs), while at the same time being able to leverage their existing infrastructure in order to stick within tight budgets. Westcon, a 3Com Distributor in South Africa, recently announced 1000BASE-T, a simple and cost-effective, yet powerful and elegant solution to this problem.
1000BASE-T is Gigabit Ethernet over Category 5 copper cabling that provides speeds of 1000Mbps. Category 5 copper cabling is the most widely installed LAN cabling infrastructure in the industry, and 1000BASE-T was formally ratified by the IEEE Standards Committee as an Ethernet standard in June of last year. Network managers are now presented with a viable alternative to costly bandwidth increases.
There are several reasons why 1000BASE-T is such an attractive option for network managers. Firstly, it addresses the exploding bandwidth demands on existing networks, which are due largely to the implementing of new applications, as well as the deployment of switching at the edge of the network. 1000BASE-T leverages the organisation`s existing investment in Ethernet and Fast Ethernet infrastructures.
"This can add up to enormous savings for an enterprise," says Chris Reeler, 3Com Product Marketing Manager at Westcon. "Gigabit Ethernet offers a simple, cost-effective performance boost, while continuing to use the dominant horizontal floor cabling medium. This approach can now significantly lessen the low bandwidth problem that network managers have been facing with the new Internet and Intranet applications."
Reeler continues, "These applications have created demanding 'any-to-any` traffic patterns, with servers distributed across the enterprise and users accessing Web sites from both inside and outside the corporate network. Under these conditions, traffic patterns and bandwidth requirements are becoming increasingly unpredictable.
"Add to this the data warehousing and backup applications that handle up to terabytes of data distributed over hundreds of servers and storage systems. Then add the bandwidth-intensive, latency-sensitive groupware applications such as desktop video- conferencing or interactive white-boarding, as well as the publication of multimedia and graphic files that have leaped in size from megabytes to terabytes, and one begins to get an idea of the pressure that network managers are under."
1000BASE-T now offers these beleaguered network managers a viable way out of their dilemma. It allows the simple migration of Ethernet/Fast Ethernet networks towards high-speed networking, by providing a host of invaluable benefits, such as:
1000BASE-T scales 10/100 Mbps performance to 1000 Mbps. Flexible 100/1000 and 10/100/1000 connectivity will be made available, which will enable the smooth migration of existing 10/100 networks to 1000 Mbps-based networks.
1000 BASE-T is now the most cost-effective high-speed networking technology on the market. It leverages existing, proven Fast Ethernet and V.90/56k modem technologies and will experience the same cost-curve as the Ethernet/Fast Ethernet technologies. In fact it is expected to be significantly more economical than the fibre-gigabit 1000 BASE-SX, which currently has the lowest cost-per-data-transmitted per second out of all the LAN technologies.
1000BASE-T preserves Ethernet equipment and infrastructure investments, including the investment in the installed Category 5 cabling infrastructure. This totally eliminates any need for time-consuming and prohibitively expensive replacing of cabling located in walls, ceilings or raised floors.
1000BASE-T takes into consideration the fact that more than 85% of all network connections were found to be Ethernet at the end of 1997, representing more than 118 million interconnected PCs, workstations and servers, making Ethernet the most widespread, dominant LAN technology in the world. "Cabling infrastructure is the longest-term networking investment there is," adds Chris Reeler. "On average, more than half of the cabling infrastructure is in place for more than five years and it can even go up to ten years.
"It was inevitable, therefore, that new advances in digital signal processing would be found to renew and extend the viability of copper cabling for high-speed data transmission. It is now definite that high performance copper cabling will continue well into this new millennium as the horizontal medium of choice for current and next generation technology," he concludes.
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