* LAN technology and industry developments over the past 10 years
With Network World celebrating 10 years on the Web, today I’m taking the opportunity to take a look back at how far LANs have come in that time.
NetworkWorld.com (which spent the majority of its 10 years as Network World Fusion) has a retrospective set up where you can see key stories from each year.
In LANs, 1996 appears to have been rather pivotal. At that time, you had a ton of networking start-ups starting up, and in LANs the key newcomers ended up being Foundry Networks and Extreme Networks. It’s funny now to see headlines like “ATM under the gun,” where Network World writer Jodi Cohen says, “ATM faces competition from a set of new technologies that could push it completely out of the LAN.”
Of course, ATM never really made a big impact in the LAN, but some vendors had been talking as if it would. Foundry and Extreme went on to build such success on the competing technology of Gigabit Ethernet that they went public and are doing pretty well for themselves these days.
In 1997 it became clear that the Layer 3 switches these companies and others were building would have a bright future. I remember thinking at the time what a dumb name that was – they were just fast routers, or routing switches, when it came down to it – but the name “Layer 3 switches” stuck.
You’ll see in the retrospective that one of the key stories highlighted in 1998 was Nortel’s purchase of Bay Networks. At the time, it wasn’t completely clear, but that really was when Cisco began to cement its domination of most areas of networking, particularly enterprise networking. Instead of giving prime competitor Bay a boost, Nortel ran into all sorts of trouble in the years after for a variety of reasons, and the potential there was never realized. Meanwhile, in 1999, at the peak of the IT industry’s innovation, Cisco bought 18 companies.
The year 2000 is when Cabletron split into four pieces, and 3Com got out of enterprise networking (before later getting back in, mainly through partnerships).
In 2001 Network World’s Phil Hochmuth wrote a story that discussed Cabletron spin-off Enterasys Networks’ plan to bring 10 Gigabit Ethernet to enterprise companies. That was an idea that was a bit ahead of its time, since back then the carriers were the ones that were really clamoring for it.
In the years since, 10 Gigabit Ethernet has built momentum, while wireless LANs have changed the LAN landscape forever as well.
It will be interesting to see what happens in coming years. What do you remember? You can discuss the past 10 years of networking in our forum.
