Adventures in the Evolution of a High- Bandwidth Network for Central Servers †
Karl L. Swartz, Les Cottrell, Marty Dart, Stanford Linear · University of North Texas Digital Library (University of North Texas) · 1994
In a small network, clients and servers may all be connected to a single Ethernet without significant performance concerns. As the number of clients on a network grows, the necessity of splitting the network into multiple sub-networks, each with a manageable number of clients, becomes clear. Less obvious is what to do with the servers. Group file servers on subnets and multihomed servers offer only partial solutions---many other types of servers do not lend themselves to a decentralized model, and tend to collect on another, well-connected but overloaded Ethernet. The higher speed of FDDI seems to offer an easy solution, but in practice both expense and interoperability problems render FDDI a poor choice. Ethernet switches appear to permit cheaper and more reliable networking to the servers while providing an aggregate network bandwidth greater than a simple Ethernet. This paper studies the evolution of the server networks at SLAC. Difficulties encountered in the deployment of FDDI are...