Barnes & Noble's new net provides plenty of room to grow

Does Barnes & Noble really need the bandwidth of a Gigabit Ethernet network to run its business? Maybe not right now, but the fast-growing bookseller wants to be ready in the event that network traffic continues to explode over the next few years.

The company learned its lesson the last time it built a network for its headquarters. It took just 18 months for traffic generated by inventory, purchasing and other applications to saturate a building network running on four Cisco Catalyst 5000 switches. So when Barnes & Noble consolidated several offices into a headquarters building in Manhattan, the company started fresh by installing a Gigabit Ethernet backbone anchored by Layer 3 switches.

Switches easily won out over traditional routers because switches tend to be a lot less expensive and because the company didn't need the extensive protocol support of most routers, says Kevin Money, LAN supervisor at Barnes & Noble. Though the network carries IPX traffic to Novell NetWare servers, the company is moving to an IP-based Windows NT environment.

Barnes & Noble also passed on ATM, given that all the company's endstations were already Ethernet or Fast Ethernet and because the company considers ATM products more difficult to configure.

After considering gear from Cisco, 3Com and Nortel Networks, Money wound up choosing Extreme Networks switches for their low cost and high capacity. He figures the Extreme network, which cost about $400,000, was about 40% less expensive than a similar Catalyst 5500 network would have been. As for switch port density, Money says Extreme's was the highest he could find without going to a chassis model, which takes up more space than a fixed-port box.

"Space in New York is always limited," Money says. The Extreme Summit48 switch has 48 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet ports, so the network can support a lot of users from a cramped wiring closet, he points out.

The wiring closets on each of the headquarters' eight floors have three or four Summit48 switches in them, which is more than enough to support the 600 users in the building. The switches connect to two BlackDiamond chassis-based Layer 3 switches in the data center. The BlackDiamonds, which can be outfitted with up to 48 Gigabit Ethernet connections each, back each other up.

Barnes & Noble renovated one floor every two weeks starting in February, and installed the Extreme gear as part of the renovations.

Barnes &Noble was a bit concerned about going with such a small vendor, thinking that the service and support might not be up to the level of some of Extreme's competitors. But Barnes & Noble talked to other Extreme customers as references before buying, and Money says he is pleased with Extreme's technical staff.

Along the way, Barnes & Noble encountered some software problems centered on the Extreme Standby Router Protocol, which is the vendor's method of rerouting traffic in the event of a failure. Money says he was impressed when Extreme flew engineers from California to the New York headquarters to track down the problem and develop a workaround.

Looking ahead

What did Barnes & Noble get out of all this? Enough room to grow, Money says. And while he hasn't tested the difference in application performance with the new network, some users swear certain applications are moving twice as fast as before.

The company is already examining ways to expand the capabilities of the switches. Money says he is looking into Extreme's offer to upgrade his Layer 2 Summit48 switches to Layer 3 for free.

While having Layer 3 switches throughout the network would be unlikely to show any immediate benefits, the technology could make it easier when the company starts videoconferencing and multicasting, Money says. With the routing function close to the users, video calls wouldn't have to traverse the network backbone if the calls were between users on the same floor. On the other hand, it's unclear whether putting the routing function everywhere might be more of a management hassle than it is worth.

Another technology that Barnes & Noble is looking at is Gigabit Ethernet over Category 5 copper wiring, to be used as a backup to the fiber-optic lines in place now. "The weakest link in any network is the cabling," Money says.

Meanwhile, some of the Cisco gear is still in place. In particular, the company has two Cisco routers connected to the BlackDiamond switches for links to the WAN.