Users gnaw on gigabit

By Michael Cooney and Robin Schreier Hohman
Network World, 6/1/98

Las Vegas - Outside, bombs were bursting, pirates were sword-fighting and boats were sinking - it seemed like a good place to talk about the perils of implementing Gigabit Ethernet.

The scene was Treasure Island's Buccaneer Bay Club and the occasion was the latest in our series of Gigabit Ethernet dinners, which took place during the recent NetWorld+Interop 98 show here. Unlike our first three feasts, which featured lively discussions among top executives from Gigabit Ethernet pioneers, such as Alteon Networks, Inc., Foundry Networks, Inc. and Prominet Corp., this time we gathered early adopters of the high-speed network technology. After all, the stuff is actually shipping now, so we figured it made more sense to talk to the people using Gigabit Ethernet products.

Changing our guest list proved to be a good move. The users, who represented a pharmaceutical company, a defense firm and a phone equipment maker, really got into the subject. Conversation jumped from deployment issues to what's missing from the technology to what still needs vendors' work.

While the restaurant is known for its great food, the cafe is also a perfect place to view Treasure Island's staged pirate battle. If you have not seen the show, every 45 minutes or so the British sail up in the hotel's faux bay to invade the pirate stronghold on Treasure Island - only to have their boat sunk in a fusillade of pirate cannon fire.

In the spirit of the pirate battle, our guests downed some wine, mead and buffalo steaks, and began to talk about the treasure that is Gigabit Ethernet.

Philip Kwan, manager of network planning and operations for Incyte Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif., had the most impressive implementation story to tell. It seems he spent about $4 million to replace his collapsed router backbone with Gigabit gear from Foundry.

"Our traditional router network was being pushed to 90% to 95% capacity for about 20% of our work week," Kwan said. "We were seeing complete network failures almost three to four times a month, which in our line of work was a serious problem, to say the least."

But that was only part of the problem. Kwan's group is trying to help discover the entire human genome system by year-end. The work is expected to help scientists better understand everything from drug interactions to disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention. The work, however, promised a four- to sixfold increase in network traffic. For a network that was expected to handle some 2T bytes of data throughput per day, something had to be done to prepare for that activity, Kwan said.

To make a long tale short, Kwan now has a Gigabit Ethernet backbone with switched 10/ 100M bit/sec capacity to every desktop. Since installation eight months ago, the Gigabit environment has not crashed, server sessions are no longer timing out and processes that previously took 14 hours to complete are being done in five hours, Kwan said.

A cannon shot interrupted Kwan's yarn. Most of the dinner participants went to the window to watch as the British battlewagon took another hit. But Jim Squicciarini, manager of data services at Lockheed Martin Corp., took the opportunity to explain his company's move to Gigabit Ethernet technology.

"We decided first off that ATM gear was just too expensive," Squicciarini said. He said his firm had implemented some 300 Gigabit Ethernet switches, mostly from Extreme Networks, Inc., to some 4,000 desktops. "We needed the switched capacity to our desktops for video and some other big applications, along with the ability to make moves, adds and changes rapidly. So far all of that is a reality with our Gigabit Ethernet backbone," Squicciarini said.

Whether it was the mead or the inspiration from the pirate battle outside, our dinner guests suddenly became feisty when asked what improvement they would most like to see in the Gigabit Ethernet realm.

The topic of whether future Gigabit gear should support Jumbo Frame sizes sparked the most verbal swordplay. Jumbo Frames bump up the maximum Ethernet frame size from 1,518 bytes to 9,000 bytes. The idea is to use oversized packets to improve packet processing speeds between switches and servers. The problem is that Jumbo Frame support is proprietary to a given vendor - Alteon has been a chief proponent - and the technology stretches the Ethernet standard beyond some experts' liking.

"There is just no excuse for building a high-speed Gigabit Ethernet pipe and shoving the itty-bitty little Ethernet packets - which by the way take as long to assemble as Jumbo Frames - down the chute," said Lee Damon, systems administrator for Qualcomm, Inc., a maker of telecommunications and e-mail products. Qualcomm has Alteon switches in a production net but is also testing gear from the likes of Cisco Systems, Inc. and Extreme.

"Jumbo Frames are BS. They are some engineer's pipe dream," Squicciarini chimed in. "If you want to drive new technology, I am behind you. But don't call Jumbo Frames Ethernet because Jumbo Frames is not Ethernet."

"Standards can change. If the standards committees would listen to what users want, then things would change," Damon retorted from the far end of our big oak dinner table.

"Yeah, then you'd be whining that none of these [multi-vendor] boxes would interoperate," Squicciarini responded. "Standards committees don't fix anything. It takes multiple vendors getting together and deciding what works and then going out and building it."

"Look, this is the same argument people had 10 years ago about mixing FDDI and Ethernet - today we have FDDI and Ethernet running happily together on routers," Kwan added.

"What? Who has FDDI? Nobody has FDDI happily running on routers today," Squicciarini said.

A waiter interrupted the exchange with dessert, which caused a bit of an uncomfortable silence but seemed to clear the air a bit and calm everyone down.

After that exchange our dinner companions were more congenial.

For example, everyone agreed that Gigabit Ethernet vendors need to come up with some better network management tools. Kwan was very specific in saying he wanted applications he could run on Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView platform.

There was also unanimity on the auto-detect function of Gigabit Ethernet cards: It stinks. Auto detect determines a variety of important session set-up parameters - such as full- or half-duplex communications - that ensure two Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet devices can talk.

"The first thing we look at if a user says his machine is slow is the duplex setting of the auto-detect function, and nine times out of 10 that's the problem," Damon said.

"No one should be doing Gigabit Ethernet at half-duplex anyway because it doesn't work very well," Kwan said. "And even if the card and the device say they are synchronized - don't believe it. You have to get in there and check - hard code, everything."

The users also agreed that vendors need to do a better job of supporting multi- protocol traffic. For example, every vendor handles IP well, but few do a good job with IPX, the users said.

The vendors also need to handle routing protocols more efficiently, according to our dinner guests. There is some solid support for Open Shortest Path First, Routing Information Protocol and others in the Foundry gear, Kwan said. But most other vendors' gear does not support that many protocols, he added.

As the dinner wound down and the pirate battles outside subsided, our guests agreed we had only begun to see the benefits and drawbacks of using such a relatively new technology. We extended an invitation to join us again in a year to see how things have progressed, and we will open up the invitation to other users who want to talk about their implementations. Next year we'll go to a nice, quiet Italian place though