NextGen LAN Infrastructure

What does the Next Generation LAN look like?

Panelists

• Jeremy Littlejohn

– President, RISC Networks Inc.

NextGen LAN Challenges

Current LAN Shortcomings

• Ethernet is Lossy

– Much worse that Fibre Channel

– Even worse when poorly executed

• Current Topologies are Inefficient

– Spanning Tree is beautiful but dated

• Wireless LAN (802.11 a/b/g)

– Works but is very crowded

• Aggregation points are choke points

Total Uplinks

Have Errors

Avg. Errors

Have Discards

Avg. Discards

5923 446 2209015 142 89432

Does Loss Matter?

Source: NetEx

Top NextGen LAN Challenges

• More Efficient

– TRILL / 802.1aq

– MPLS / VPLS in the LAN

• Mobility

– 802.11n

• Speed

– 10 Gbps Ethernet

• Adaptability

– DCB (Data Center Bridging)

Success

Low Jitter

Low Latency Lossless

10 GB Ethernet Saturation

135,870

871

250,039

0

50000

100000

150000

200000

250000

300000

1.0 Gbps 10 Gbps 100 Mbps

• 109

Customers

• 34 Have

10Gbps

• 2,271

Average

Nodes

• Only 396

10Gbps

ports in use

Some Vendor-ese I heard this week

• Network needs to be Simpler

• Network must become Flat

• Open Standards are the reason that our product works

• Virtual Machines are flying all over the place

What do You Think?

• Thank you for participating!