Hardware Solutions Compared

Network Switches

Network switches (also called multi-segment bridges/fast routers) are very popular in the market as evidenced by the explosive growth over the last 5 years. In a very short period of time, network switches have been transformed from a specialty $60M niche market to a $1.5B mainstream product with support from many vendors.

The rapid acceptance of network switches can be directly linked to the ease of deployment (no changes to desktop wiring/NICs) and the immediate and measurable improvement in segment performance. Switches do a very good job of moving the bottleneck away from the local segment and concentrating data into high speed links connected to file servers.

One limitation of network switches, however, is that they do not improve the performance of existing file servers. In fact, we have found that 20-30% of switch users (especially in large accounts where applications are installed and run from file servers) find that there is no improvement after installing the switch because once the segment bottleneck is solved, the file server becomes the limiting factor.

Shared LAN Cache is different. Shared LAN Cache eliminates redundant read requests that represent up to 80% of the load on a network with application software loaded on the file server. Shared LAN Cache solves the segment problem with or without a switch and ALSO offloads the existing file server. Look for network switches in the coming year with SLC buried in the switch fabric.

100M+ Technology - FDDI, Fast Ethernet

100M technology (using FDDI) has been around for a number of years as a high speed backbone technology but has not been widely deployed to the desktop. In the last 6 months however, 100M technology has become increasingly affordable (under $300 NICs) and there are many vendors offering compatible cards.

Further, the industry has widely adopted a 10/100 standard for NICs that can be installed in PCs today and used with existing 10M hubs and wiring. When appropriate wiring and 100M hubs are available, the benefit of faster LANs can be realized without the expense of purchasing another NIC and installing it in the PC.

100M technology increases the maximum theoretical bandwidth but has two limitations:

1. The increased performance to the desktop does not improve the overall performance of the file server which can quickly become the bottleneck.
2. Even with the 3-5X increase in available bandwidth, the 100M bandwidth can quickly be consumed by adding users and applications to a 100M segment.

Shared LAN cache provides similar performance boosts (3-5X) and can offload as much as 80% of the file server by redirecting requests to a combination of local and remote caches.

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