A Core Competence Product Evaluation

Roles for the Desktop Switch and Switch 1000

We see the roles of the Desktop Switch and Switch 1000 as both overlapping and complementing. The Desktop Switch can be deployed among work groups where the need to relieve LAN traffic congestion is immediate and prevalent among that work group.

	The figure at the left illustrates our initial configuration of the Desktop Switch. Here, we provided Power PCs, Powerbooks, Pentium PCs, and Sparc stations with dedicated 10 Mbps Ethernet, and connected our Intranet Server to the 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet port. In this work group configuration, all the end stations run contention-free Ethernet over their respective ports.
Figure 3. Desktop Switch Initial Configuration

The Switch 1000 can also be used for this purpose, but it additionally provides a migration path from shared to dedicated 10 Mbps Ethernet, by allowing the network administrator to leave those work groups and end stations whose bandwidth needs are satisfied with shared Ethernet "as is", by connecting hubs to a switch port as an uplink. When the demands for dedicated 10 Mbps Ethernet increase among the work groups served by a Switch 1000, a Desktop Switch could be installed in its place, and the Switch 1000 could be relocated to another area of the enterprise where shared and dedicated Ethernet can co-exist.

The figure at the right illustrates our initial configuration of the Switch 1000. Here, we configured Pentium PCs, a Laptop PC, and a Sparc station with dedicated 10 Mbps Ethernet. We then connected two Power PCs and a Powerbook to a 3Com OfficeConnect shared medium Ethernet hub and attached this via an uplink to the Switch 1000. The initial configuration resulted in a single VLAN with dedicated bandwidth to our Intranet server and power users.

Figure 4. Switch 1000 Initial Configuration

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