Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!COD.NOSC.MIL!neerma
From: neerma@COD.NOSC.MIL (Merle A. Neer)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: TCP/IP Fiber Optic Ring Backbone
Message-ID: <8803301633.AA19757@cod.nosc.mil>
Date: 30 Mar 88 16:33:23 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 37

Hi,

I must confess I am totally unaware of 802.3 "ring" technology.
I have never heard of such a beast, however, I will comment on
some of your other concerns to the effect that I agree totally.
I am currently involved in evaluation of local net architecture
solutions for NOSC Hawaii.  In this effort I have been looking
at 802.3 vs. 802.5, FDDI, SAFENET, etc.  I concur with your
comment that you dont want to lock yourself into a vendor
proprietary solution; open systems is the name of the game. In
the absence of a valid reason to do otherwise(need for process
control, real-time applications, etc.) others have already made
the observation that Ethernet is the safest, most conservative,
and ubiquitous technology here today.  The product choices both
for hardware and software favor this solution.  Tomorrow FDDI
and for the military, SAFENET(a variant on FDDI), will probably
be the technology of choice.  For maximum interoperability,
consider that gateways(routers), bridges, etc. are available now
for Ethernet.  As far as performance goes, we have an Ethernet
here(at NOSC) used by some 50 hosts for the usual traffic mix
of interactive login, file transfer, transaction processing, tape
backups, etc.  I have never seen the peak utilization go above
2%.  This is typical I believe.  It could be that the kind of
applications you will run will require higher performance than
802.3 can offer; if this is the case, of course, the correct
solution is not Ethernet.  

Anyway, it will be interesting to hear more about this 802.3
"ring"!

Regards,
Merle Neer
NOSC
neerma at nosc.mil
619-553-4135

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