Re: Hello, MAE-East?!

[Nathan Stratton <nathan () robotics net>]

On Mon, 3 Nov 1997, Mike Gibbs wrote:

> According to the techs at MFS, the NEW design is five gigaswitches
> plugging into one gigaswitch.  No one will be plugged into this switch,
> that is giga6.  The problem accuring at Mae-East now sits on its hardware.
> With this design, giga6 must switch more traffic then its backplane can
> handle.  This causes packet-loss, and annoyed customers.  DECs switches
> seem to have a limited spanning-tree, so they can't have two gigaswitchs
> for bridges and split the load between them.  Again, this is what I got
> from talking to their techs.  Supposedly DEC and MFS are working these
> problems out.

I agree it is a bad design, but it should be able to handle the traffic. I
check the DEC www page, and they say the backplane can handle 3.6 gb/s. 

-Nathan