[523] in Resnet-Forum
Re: Intelligent hubs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dane Spearing)
Tue Feb 28 16:27:54 1995
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 1995 13:07:58 -0800
From: Dane Spearing <dane@rescomp.stanford.edu>
To: JOHNB@UBO.Lan.McGill.CA, Resnet-forum@MIT.EDU
>We are contemplating wiring our residence halls, beginning with a
>pilot this summer. Our Computing Centre Director is proposing that
>we use intelligent hubs to link a NIC in a student's PC or Mac to the
>backbone, rather than building LANs and connecting through them.
>He believes that this will reduce costs, will reduce LAN and shared
>application software management problems (there won't be any) and
>improve security at the individual pillow.
The big problem with this is the huge increase in traffic you're
going to see over your backbone. One of the beauties of the LAN
model is that it keeps local traffic local, rather than spreading
it to the backone. Of course, the solution to the above problem
is to use packet-switching hubs (not just "intelligent" hubs, which
simply mean that they are SMNP queryable and configurable).
Unfortunately, packet-switching hubs are *very* expensive.
(e.g. - Stanford ResComputing just got a 10-port packet-switching
hub made by Kalpana for one of our dorms, 5 fiber ports, 5 10baseT ports,
and the thing cost about $10,000 - yeouch). Compare this with the
cost of, say, a 24-port intelligent 10baseT hub at about $2,000.
I think you're still better cost wise of going with a LAN model, bridged
together with something like NAT bridges, and intelligent hubs,
rather than packet-switching hubs.
Dane Spearing --- Residential Computing --- Stanford University
dane@rescomp.stanford.edu -- (415) 723-4800
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~dane/dane.html
