LOCAL AREA NETWORKS

CERN LAN Support

CERN has several strategic LAN problems to solve including: providing 100 times more integrated bandwidth over 10 years; providing high bandwidth, highly reliable paths especially between CORE and collaborative work groups; and accommodating the need to support multiple protocols, supporting multicast, synchronous applications such as video conferencing.

The strategies to address these problems include: converting the CERN wiring to a structured fiber and copper cabling scheme and select one or more suppliers of network hubs/switches; isolate selected zones behind routers; select an industrial network management system; deploy FDDI as appropriate; deploy FDDI and Ethernet switches as appropriate; prepare for ATM deployment; prepare for the next generation of IP.

They are investing in DEC FDDI Gigaswitches to be used in tandem for semi-hot failover. CERN have been evaluating the Gigaswitch and have found it to be very complex containing over 250,000 lines of code. Management of the Gigaswitch was based on the DECmcc network management station which was de-emphasized in DEC's future plans late in '93, which came as a shock to CERN. They have an FDDI Sniffer and Tekelec for FDDI troubleshooting.

CERN have also been looking at Alantec & Kalpana Ethernet switches to increase aggregate Ethernet bandwidth with the intent to upgrade them to ATM when available. They also have an ATM pilot project with a 4-port ATM switch from Netcom plus an HP workstation with a prototype ATM interface and router.

For an industrial network management system they are looking at OpenView, Net-View/6000, SunNeT Manager and Cabletron's Spectrum. They appear to be particularly interested in Spectrum. Since they have a large legacy of DECnet this must weigh heavily on any selection. In the meantime they continue to use the CERN developed network management system. They generate statistical reports on utilization and errors/pkt from bridges (DEC & HP). They use pings every 5 minutes to establish reachability and display maps with lines between rodes scaled in width depending on the error rates. They do not make ping timing measurements on a regular basis. Trouble-ticketing uses email to notify responsible people. They will look at paging people via phone in the future.

CERN is moving from a bridged network to a subnetted network. Since IP addresses are randomly set with respect to geography subnetting will be difficult. IP addresses can be requested by sending email to tcpip@cern.ch.

DESY LAN Support

DESY have invested in Giga Routers from Net Star in Minneapolis. The Giga router is like the DEC Gigaswitch in that it provides non-blocking FDDI access between 16, 32, or 64 ports (the Giga Switch supports 32 port maximum). It also supports IP routing, unlike the Gigaswitch, and will be adding MAC layer bridging in the near future. They also plan to add OC-12 ATM access later in 1994 Each port can sustain 1 Gbps and the aggregate bandwidth is 70Gbps. The cost is about $110K including 7 HIPPI ports and 4 FDDI ports. It supports SNMP. DESY have only had the Giga Router for a week so it is too early to relate experiences. John Morrison at Los Alamos was identified as someone who had been testing Giga Routers: DESY is using a DEC Gigaswitch to build an Alpha cluster for open VMS support.

RAL LAN Support

RAL is divided into "villages" each of which is connected to the backbone, & each of which has an identified autonomous village network manager (VNM). The VNM has a bank of IP addresses that she/he can allocate. An email list is maintained of VNMs so they can be notified of changes that may affect the network. News is not used for this purpose since they feel it would add to the information overload, be irrelevant to most users and cause unnecessary concern. They also log such changes by keeping copies of all the notifications. The departments choose the VNMs. The quality of VNMs varies widely. Central support is considering producing some documents to help VNMs. There is a LANs management committee that is run by operations and meets about every three months. For a fee the central support group will manage a village's network. Central support does most of the network installations.

There are about 9 FTEs in Network Operations. Network Development is split across several groups including an Advanced Communications Unit (5 FTEs). IBM Networking Group (3FTEs) and Communications and Small systems (9 FTEs).

They are moving from a bridged to a routed network with the villages being placed behind routers. They are installing UTP5 in 1 wing of the computer building as a test. It is easier to manage and can support FDDI and ATM later. They have an FDDI backbone with DEC concentraters and 3Com and NSC routers. The 3Com routers were chosen after evaluating bids from 3Com, Cisco and Wellfleet. They are highly reliable and easier to configure than Ciscos. They route IP, and IPX and are starting to route AppleTalk. Next they will route Decnet. There were FDDI performance problems related with AIX/6000 release 3.2.2 which are fixed in more recent releases. They have a W&G FDDI analyzer that they selected over an HP and Sniffer. To manage the 3Com routers they bought the 3Com application for SunNet Manager. They also have 4 Ethermeters, but do not appear to be making heavy use of them. They have not taken network management seriously yet since the network is running smoothly and problems are only at the irritant level. They would like to get some baseline measurements. RAL is looking at ATM: they have a 4 port ATM switch from Fore that will be used with Alphas (AIX is not ready yet). They want to investigate the speed of connection for high volume servers and farms. They also have a Netcom ATM switch and will connect the two switches. They are hoping for 3Com to provide an ATM router interface.

For home use they have 19.2 kbps access into a Decserver (using V.Fast modems). ISDN is reasonably deployed in the UK. Initial install costs are about $600.00. Rental costs are quarterly. They are looking to use ISDN to support SLIP for work workstation and PC connections at home.