THE LAN SWITCHING LANDSCAPE

Enterprise network traffic volumes are accelerating quickly. As a result, organizations are seeking much faster LAN connections—to gigabit speeds and beyond—not only in their campus backbones, but also in their wiring closets for highspeed connectivity all the way to user desktops.

There are several application drivers behind the exploding volumes of enterprise traffic. Businesses are continuing to grow progressively more reliant on their corporate networks for automating their business processes. For example, Web-centric applications, often multimedia in nature, have emerged not only to reach employees across corporate intranets, but also to enable enterprises to communicate with their business partners across extranets and to serve customers via the Internet. Specifically, a few of the primary applications driving gigabit-speed network requirements include following:

• Storage-area networks, which allow multiple servers access to the same storage devices connected by a multi gigabit-speed switch
• Network-based corporate training, often involving streaming media or interactive video conferencing
• Network-based transport for PC and server data backup
• IP PBXs, which enable the convergence of voice and data on the corporate LAN