[K12OSN] designing a new school's network
Sam Snow
snowsam at laurel-point.net
Mon Jan 22 15:33:30 UTC 2007
I read the following article this weekend and was reminded of the recent
discussion on network designs for a school that would be terminal server
friendly. The article talked about an alternative to the traditional
network design that they claim offers both more bandwidth to the user and
a lower cost. I've included a link and quick excerpt that talks about the
bandwidth advantages of this design.
Sam
"Bringing increased bandwidth ever closer to the user"
A new architecture known as fiber-to the-telecom enclosure capitalizes on
the bandwidth capabilities of optical circuits.
http://cim.pennnet.com/display_article/281158/27/ARTCL/none/none/Bringing-increased-bandwidth-ever-closer-to-the-user/
A small excerpt:
"High performance is an additional key benefit of FTTE. Both the low- and
high-density FTTE options provide excellent performance in terms of
bandwidth delivered to the work area. In many enterprises, 32-port
switches are typically deployed and configured with one 1-Gbit/sec fiber
uplink to the ER. This provides each workstation approximately 31
Mbits/sec of average throughput (1 Gbit/sec divided by 32 ports). Even if
the 32-port switch is configured with two 1-Gbit/sec fiber uplinks, the
average throughput available to each workstation is only 63 Mbits/sec.
In each of these cases, the backbone has insufficient capacity to carry
the full traffic from all workstations, each running at their maximum rate
of 100 Mbits/sec. This design results in an .oversubscribed. switch (32
ports x 100 Mbits/sec = 3.2 Gbits/sec required, where only 1 or 2
Gbits/sec is available).
The FTTE low-density design offers the highest performance to the work
area because the 8-port mini-switch is totally non-blocking. That is,
excess .capacity. exists as 200 Mbits/sec remains on the 1-Gbit/sec fiber
backbone to the TR when all eight ports are operating at 100 Mbits/sec.
The switch is able to provide connectivity to all eight workstations
requiring 100 Mbits/sec simultaneously, because the aggregate total from
the eight workstations is 800 Mbits/sec and the uplink can provide 1,000
Mbits/sec. The mini-switch in the FTTE low-density design is
.non-blocking. or .undersubscribed.. The high-density FTTE design
represents a sacrifice in performance, but offers increased installation
savings."
More information about the K12OSN
mailing list