Jose E. Miranda
Bay Networks
AbstractToday, internetworking is undergoing significant change, driven primarily by business demands, the need to support new applications, and by ongoing advances in communications technology.
As networks evolve in response to these forces of change, the challenge is to provide increased bandwidth in a scalable fashion, while also delivering class of service support for new multimedia applications. It is also important to build a flexible networking infrastructure that can accommodate the constant changes businesses undergo, and that simplifies the administration of user moves, adds and changes, while reducing the complexity associated with managing the network. Today's enterprise-wide internetworks are running mission-critical applications, and cannot be used as testbeds for trying out new technology. Consequently, it is essential that the new network maintain the highest levels of availability and reliability.
A New Network Paradigm
The response to this challenges is a new networking paradigm called switched internetworking, which combines the benefits of switching technology with traditional shared media hub and router technologies. Switching will provide dedicated bandwidth to the desktop, scalable backbone bandwidth, the ability to define logical communities of interest, support for class of service for both delay-sensitive, transaction-oriented application and new multimedia applications.
Switching technology promises to revolutionize network computing today in much the same way that LAN technology revolutionized mainframe and minicomputer-based computing over 10 years ago. However, just as the road to LAN-based network computing was an evolutionary process, the vendors need to provide an evolutionary migration path to switched internetworking that will allow users to realize the benefits of switching, while protecting their investment in existing shared media hubs and routers.
(No Paper Submitted)