Switching White Papers
Introduction to the SmartSwitch Family
Overview The networking infrastructures that have been deployed over the last four to five years are steadily changing. Local area networks were at one time a "nice-to-have" technology used to share common network resources; these networks were usually driven by department heads, and the operating system was usually the critical choice in the network purchase decision. The speed of workstation processors meant that the physical network infrastructure - in those days, a piece of yellow coax cable or a shared dumb repeater-was never an issue in network performance. Applications and workstations could not produce enough traffic to fill, let alone overload, even the slowest network. The only real technology choice at the time was for shared, packet-based physical networks. The network is now a critical part of any IT infrastructure-as critical to the operation of a business as road systems are to any modern and mobile society. Countries can't function without transportation systems such as roads, rail or air-likewise, networks are the transportation system for business information. If the network doesn't perform, can't be controlled or, in the worst case, doesn't work at all, then businesses can't function. Long gone are the networks comprised of mainframes and terminals exchanging information that required support for only bits of information. Today, IT infrastructures have evolved into client/server environments, with intranets and Internet access that requires bandwidth reaching the Gigabit-per-second range.
| Publisher | Enterasys | File Format | HTML |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date Published | August 2003 | Downloads | 5 |
| Format | White Papers | ||
| Topics | |||
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