FDDI nears the end of the line
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FDDI users who have delayed migration to newer, faster technologies had best get moving because FDDI's days are now officially numbered.
Chip manufacturers have announced a "last call" for FDDI silicon, which means network vendors are developing their last FDDI products. Once the current supply of FDDI chips and network devices runs out, there will be no more.
"The last time we accepted orders was July," says Mike Shoemake, product manager for Motorola's PowerQuick line of communications processors. "Our last ship date is January 2000."
Once the darling of high-speed LAN users, the 100M bit/sec fiber-optic gear has been supplanted by faster technologies, such as Gigabit Ethernet and ATM, and less-expensive ones, such as Fast Ethernet. The last surge in FDDI purchases was in 1995 and 1996, when ATM was in its LAN infancy and Gigabit Ethernet was merely a glimmer in some engineer's eye.
The market for FDDI has been sharply declining since 1996.
Some users are already well into their migrations. Texas Christian University (TCU) in Fort Worth, Texas, once had 30 hosts and about 4,000 endstations on an FDDI network; that's now down to two hosts and a half-dozen endstations, says Bill Senter, manager of technical services at the university.
TCU converted most of its FDDI nodes to Gigabit Ethernet last summer. The school will complete its transition in the next month, Senter says.
"We actually decided to go before we heard [the last call]," Senter says. "It was like, 'Wow, good thing we were moving.' We really have liked FDDI and almost had a sentimental attachment to it because it's been so reliable and the redundancy's been great."
The Home Shopping Network in St. Petersburg, Fla., still has an FDDI ring at the heart of its network, but plans to replace that with Gigabit Ethernet early next year, says Roderick White, HSN's vice president of telecommunications.
"Since we intend to make the switch in February - our slowest month - this [last call] announcement will not change our timeline," White says. "Most of the time, being lucky is better than being good. In this case, we lucked out."
Vendors have been encouraging FDDI customers to migrate to alternative technologies for a few years, but now the encouragement has been replaced by prodding and nudging.
"FDDI has been a very stable technology for customers and has served them well for quite a long time," says Tim Hale, senior product marketing manager at 3Com. "With this news from the silicon vendors, now is the time to seriously look at your FDDI migration solution rather than waiting until you can't get FDDI anymore."
3Com offers up to a 20% rebate toward the purchase of qualified 3Com products on the trade-in of comparable, competitive networking products. 3Com also offers a rebate of 50% off the list price of its CoreBuilder 9000 switch when customers trade in earliergeneration 3Com switches.
For those who want to squeeze through the last few bits, vendors are stockpiling FDDI products to last a few years.
"Especially in the high-end router series, we recognize that FDDI is going to be around for quite a while. So we decided to go ahead and invest pretty heavily in doing a very large last-time buy to take care of any of our demand requirements far into the future," says Tom Russell, manager of product marketing for high-end routing at Cisco.
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